“She’s sleeping again,” says the white-clad duty nurse who leads me into Mom’s treatment room. “She’ll come around again any minute, though.”
My mother is lying on her back beneath a thin sheet. She has an IV in her arm and monitor cables hanging off various parts of her body. The soundtrack of beeps, hums, and clicks is my least favorite in the world. She looks so small and vulnerable on the treatment table, it’s as though she is here to serve the machines lining the wall and not vice versa.
“I’m fine waiting,” I say, taking a seat in the plastic chair someone has provided for me. “Thanks.”
“Anything you need, just let me know. I’m Verbena Jackson. Dr. Cage is my favorite doctor. Has been ever since the old days.”
“Thanks, Verbena. I’ll tell him you said that.”
“Yes, indeed.” She lowers her voice. “And all this mess in the papers lately, that’s just a shame. Gettin’ up in people’s business. Lord, I’m gonna miss that cigar of his, the way he’d leave it at the nurses’ station while he made rounds in the rooms, then pick it up on his way out. They don’t make ’em like Doc anymore.” Nurse Jackson checks Mom’s monitor screens, then nods and walks to the door. “Like I said, you let me know if you need something.”
“I will.”
After she closes the door, I sit and watch my mother’s chest rise and fall in shallow breaths, like those of a restless child. After a couple of minutes, I reach out and lay my hand on her leg, which feels cold and still beneath the sheet. As the beeps and clicks mark the feeble workings of her body, I remember something Lincoln said on the witness stand the first time he was called up by Shad. Lincoln was talking about his mother lying to him about who his real father was, and how he had known she was lying. He said that because of his experience as a con man, he could always tell when people were trying to deceive him. When Shad pointed out that Viola had been successfully lying to him about his paternity since he was a child, Lincoln said: When a woman who never lies tells her first lie . . . nobody questions it. Nobody catches on, because they can’t even imagine that person trying to deceive them. It’s the Big Lie. But inside a family. And that’s why I never caught on . . .
Mom’s leg jerks under my hand, and her eyes flutter, but they remain closed. Getting to my feet, I lean down to her ear and murmur, “Mom, you’re in the hospital, but you’re fine.”
At the sound of my voice, her eyes open, and after some effort she focuses on me. I don’t see recognition in her eyes, though, only confusion.
“You recognize me, right?”
“Where’s Annie? Where’s Mia?”
“They’re safe, Mom. They’re still in Louisiana, with the FBI watching over them.”
“Oh . . . oh, yes. That’s right.”
I see pain rush in like a dark tide as her short-term memory returns to her. “Oh, Penn,” she says, her voice freighted with grief. “Why did he do it? After all that . . . why did Tom plead guilty?”
I take a deep breath before answering, and then I find that words fail me.
“Is it too late to change the plea?” she asks.
“Yes. Quentin bargained it down to a lesser charge, but—”
“But Tom still has to go to prison.”
I nod. “Three years.”
“Oh, God.” She pulls the sheet up to her neck with one hand clenched like a claw. “He’s going to die there.”
“I’m going to do everything humanly possible to get him out. But right now we need to focus on you.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter.”
“It matters, Mom. It matters to Annie. It matters to Jenny. It matters to me. And most of all, it matters to Dad.”
This time she doesn’t respond. She just lies there with tears leaking from her eyes, and she makes no effort to wipe them away. How hard do we work to blind ourselves to things we don’t want to see? I wonder. Even if they’re right in front of us?
Mom lied to me the day after Dad jumped bail—about not being in contact with him—but when she admitted it to me, I wrote off the anomaly as loyalty to her husband. How many lies have the two of them told to protect each other? Or to protect us, their children?
“Mom,” I say, reaching out and gently squeezing her shoulder, “I need to ask you something. Did you go to Cora Revels’s house the night Viola died?”
She doesn’t answer, but her eyes focus on me, and the muscles in her face almost shiver in their struggle to convey incredulity, denial, indignation, anger, and finally . . . relief.
“How did you find out?” she whispers.
“Jenny told me she called your house several times that morning, and you never answered.”
“Well, that’s not—”
“Mom, don’t.”
She takes a deep breath, then wipes her eyes and exhales very slowly.
“Dad lied on the stand, didn’t he? To protect you.”
“What is it you want to know, Penn?”
“What happened in Cora’s house that night.”
My mother’s mouth tightens into a line, and her eyes flick around the room. “What’s the use? Viola’s gone, and your father’s going to Parchman. Nothing’s going to change that, is it?”
“I need to know the truth. It’s time. Ya’ll kept it from me till now, and look how things have turned out. If I’m going to help Dad, I have to know what happened to Viola.”
She reaches up and takes hold of my arm, like someone clinging to a ship’s rail in heavy weather. “Those last weeks before she died,” she says, “I knew something strange was going on. It had been a long time since Tom had gone on so many house calls, or stayed out that late. So, one night I followed him. As soon as he turned onto that little road, the road to Cora’s house, I knew where he was going. It was the same house Viola’s parents had lived in back in . . . before.”
“You knew about the affair back when it happened, didn’t you? In 1968.”
Mom hesitates, then nods.
“Nothing ever got by you, did it?”
“Not much. In this case, I wish it had. Today, in court, I realized that I hadn’t known about the affair until after it ended. After Viola was raped, she stopped sleeping with Tom. He was acting like himself up to that time. But when she ended it, he changed. Overnight. He couldn’t sleep, he got short with me, with everyone.”
“Did you have any idea what Viola had done to Frank Knox?”
“No. I didn’t know about the rapes at all. Not then.”
“What did you know?”
“Only that something was wrong with my husband. So I followed Tom one day, just like I would forty years later. And he drove to a little house on the colored side of town. Nellie Jackson owned it, as Tom said today. Viola was hiding there.”
A prickle of apprehension raises the hair on my neck. “What did you do, Mom?”
She shakes her head slowly, her eyes focused on a scene from the deep past. “I waited for Tom to leave. As he did, I saw Viola through a crack in the door. Just a glimpse, but in that instant I understood everything. Wives are very sensitive to that kind of threat. I was sure he was in love with her—which he was. I didn’t go inside then. I drove around for a while, scared to death. I was terrified that Tom would leave us to be with her.”