“Any of you,” she says, squeezing my hand. “That’s why we have to protect him. Even from himself. As much as I love Tom, he has one major flaw. He’s from the Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway school.”
“He’s a stoic, all right. But that may not be the whole explanation. I know he has some secrets. There are definitely chapters of his life he’s never told me about.”
“Like?”
“Korea, for one. I know he was wounded there, but I don’t know how. I know he has a couple of medals, but only because my mother told me. Dad seems almost ashamed of them.”
“Didn’t he save Walt Garrity’s life over there?”
“Yes, and Walt saved his. But they’ve never told anyone how that happened—not even my mother.”
“That’s definitely weird.” Caitlin lifts her leg again, then hooks her big toe around the lever and pulls the tap closed. “I can’t stop thinking about Tom and Viola. Your mom certainly never gave me the idea that Tom ever cheated on her.”
“She wouldn’t, even if he had and she knew about it.”
“Oh, she’d know,” Caitlin said with certainty. “Peggy is smarter than all of us.”
This is a truth known only to our family, but none of us doubts it.
Caitlin runs her fingernails along my forearm. “If this somehow went as far as a trial, would you really not defend him?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve been thinking about Quentin Avery.”
She looks up in surprise. “The civil rights lawyer?”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t he die?”
“No. He just lost his other leg. Diabetes.”
“Christ, that’s an epidemic down here. Surely he must be retired?”
“Quentin lost his legs, Caitlin, not his brain. But he is retired, as a matter of fact.”
“How old is he?”
“A little older than Dad, probably. Dad’s been his personal physician for most of his life. If Quentin Avery would come out of retirement to defend anybody, it would be Dad.”
“I’ve heard some mixed things about Quentin over the years.”
“You could say the same about me. Quentin is my first choice, hands down.”
A black Mississippian who left his native state in the early 1950s to go to law school, Quentin Avery fought on the front lines of the civil rights movement, wherever those lines happened to be. More than once, he tried landmark cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, and won. In the latter part of his career, Quentin drew criticism for taking on lucrative plaintiffs’ cases, but even then he always did a certain amount of pro bono work for the cause.
Caitlin rises into a sitting position, then slides to the other end of tub, so that she’s facing me, her breasts half submerged in the water. Intuition tells me she’s about to probe me about Henry Sexton’s work. I need to distract her. As casually as possible, I say, “Didn’t you tell me the other day that you were late for your period?”
She waves her hand as if dismissing the most trivial of issues. “Oh, you know me. Too much exercise, probably. I’ll get it this week.”
My digression has thrown her off balance, but only for a few seconds. She jabs my chest with her toes and says, “I know you made Henry a promise, but you need to give me something to work on. There’s no way I can sleep after what’s happened. Give me some way to help Tom.”
“I wish I could. But I really need to go see him now.”
“What about Annie? I was planning to go back to the paper.”
“What for? It would really help me if you stayed with her. Just for an hour. I could take her with me, but Mom’s probably already in bed.”
Caitlin doesn’t even try to hide her frustration. “I’ll stay. But if you find out about the paternity thing, you’ve got to tell me the answer. You didn’t promise Henry anything about that.”
“I know. You’re right.” I touch her knee and squeeze gently. “But there’s something you need to know.”
Fear flickers in her eyes. “You don’t think Tom killed her?”
“No. But I honestly don’t know. Dad might well have had a euthanasia pact with Viola.”
Caitlin fans steam away from her face like a garden-club matron at a summer tea. “Come on, out with it.”
“He helped Sarah at the end.”
Caitlin looks toward the ceiling and closes her eyes. Then she says, “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Do you want to know?”
Taking my hand, she squeezes softly. “Yes.”
“Sarah’s breast cancer was particularly aggressive. We were living in Houston then, so she got cutting-edge care, but it wasn’t enough. She had a lot of mets—that’s metastases. Her brain, her bones. Intractable pain. She fought hard, but in some ways that was as much a curse as a blessing. The harder she fought, the worse it got. Her parents had been living with us, but even that got too hard. Her father had to move to a hotel nearby. He couldn’t take the strain. At the end, the doctors couldn’t control the pain without knocking her out. Sarah wanted to be at home with Annie, and she wanted to be conscious.”
I pause for a moment, trying to come to grips with the memory. It’s one I don’t allow out of my subconscious very often.
“Was Tom treating her also?”
“Not up to that point. But when things reached that pass, Dad drove out from Natchez with a black bag. He talked to Sarah’s doctors, then got rid of the nurses we had working at the house. From that point on, he and Mom and Sarah’s mother took care of her. I don’t know how he did it, but Dad managed to give Sarah extended lucid periods without pain. She spent almost every minute of that time with Annie.”
“And you,” Caitlin says softly.
I nod, trying to finish the story without remembering too vividly, or even fully engaging with my thoughts. “That lasted about three days. Then one night, Dad came in and relieved me from my shift beside Sarah’s bed. I went out to the couch and fell asleep. He woke me about five hours later.”
“She was gone?”