“Seriously?”
“Sure. But the thing is, that won’t shut him up. He could still talk from prison. And Jet could still take Kevin away from you.”
“Then what? I know you. I know this is leading to something.”
Max ground his jaw as if in pain, then spoke in a voice devoid of all emotion. “There’s only one answer to this, son. Something’s got to happen that leaves only one parent alive. You. Then there’s no doubt whatever. You’d have custody forever, and no one would ever ask for a DNA test. Why would they? Nobody alive would even suspect the truth.”
“You’re talking about murder.”
His father shrugged. “I’m taking about justice. I’m talking about a woman taking another man into her bed and wrecking a marriage. A man whose life you saved in wartime, who then turned around and betrayed you when you were at your lowest point.”
Paul could hardly make himself believe that Jet and Marshall were capable of that level of betrayal. “They told you they mean to leave and take Kevin?”
“Paul, you’re nothing to them but an obstacle to be gotten around.”
Paul leaned over and took hold of the bed frame with his left hand. He was afraid he might throw up.
“I told you I went in his house,” Max said. “Look what I found.”
Max reached into a slot in his cell phone case and brought out a folded piece of ruled notebook paper. Paul took it from his father with quivering hands and unfolded it. What he saw was the intricate pencil doodle of a talented junior high school girl, the kind of thing Jet would spend most of an hour on during history class. He knew Jet had drawn it, because of the Arabic flourishes around the letters, which made the whole thing look like some sultan’s ceiling in an Ottoman palace. The shading variations alone looked like the work of a professional artist. All this Paul registered in the time it took to draw a breath. But what lasted longer, what burned itself into his brain and heart, were the letters at the center of the design: Jordan McEwan. Contained in those two words was the dream of young Jordan Elat Talal, who would years later become Jet Matheson. Scrawled across the bottom of the intricate design were more words, much smaller, yet even more painful, because they were obviously more recent. Written with a pen, they read: Remember this?! Prophecy after all!
“Son?” Max said.
A tear fell onto the paper, staining it gray. Paul had not cried in more years than he could remember, except on a couple of occasions when Kevin had made him so proud that he could not contain his emotion.
“It’s gonna be all right,” his father said. “I know it’s bad now, but we’re gonna make it right. We just have to work it out.”
Paul slowly folded the paper, slipped it into his pocket, and walked out of the hospital room. As he boarded the big elevator with a legless black man in a wheelchair, he realized he had ascended to a plane where earthly concerns no longer mattered. That piece of paper, combined with his memory of the lovemaking video, had wounded him in a way that blades and bullets never could. But it was his father’s revelation about Kevin’s paternity—and the obscene ongoing deception that it implied—that triggered a dark epiphany unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
Max was right. All his life Paul had sensed some ineffable distance between himself and his son. He had never spoken of it to a soul. In fact, he’d hardly let himself dwell on the feeling long enough to analyze it. To do so would have been like walking out onto four inches of ice over a bottomless lake. But now . . . his father had dredged the unspeakable secret from that lake bottom and winched it to the surface. Paul’s new awareness blotted out all else and could be expressed in a single sentence that played over and over in his mind: I may be a fool, but you’ll die before you take my son . . .
Chapter 50
Death is absolute. It sweeps all before it. Death long expected arrives like the eye of a slow hurricane: days of wind, rain, and thunder—then silence. The rain will return as the storm moves through, but you won’t feel it, being numb. Once the storm passes, you won’t ever be the same. Feeling returns to a person changed.
When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.
The hours since my father died have blurred into vignettes of my mother’s old friends stopping by with foil-covered casserole dishes and Mom compulsively straightening up the house. Intermittent thunder has made the house shudder, but the rain never comes. I’ve checked my iPhone at least a dozen times, but as yet I’ve received no call or text from Blake Donnelly or Arthur Pine. Perhaps my father’s death has made them reluctant to call, but I can’t imagine sentimentality getting in the way of Poker Club business—especially with their reputations and even their liberty on the line. More than once I’ve worried that they might decide to kill Beau Holland rather than force him to stand trial for Buck’s murder, then present me with a fait accompli. Claude Buckman and company are nothing if not practical.
I took it upon myself to remove the assistive apparatus of Dad’s illness from the front room, though I could see it upset Mom to watch it packed away. She wanted it out of sight, but its removal was like an erasure of his final months in this house. During the silent caesuras between neighbors’ visits, she and I sit in the den, going through old photo albums she dug from a cabinet in the guest room. Most date to before Adam’s death. Some of the best pictures are from those rare occasions—once every year or two—that it snowed in Bienville, and we hauled pizza pans out to the Indian Village to slide down the snow-covered ceremonial mounds. In one shot, Dad, wrapped like a Sherpa, carries me up a steep mound while Adam, who looks about seven, trudges beside him like Edmund Hillary summiting Everest. No one looking at these photos would guess that this happy triumvirate would be shattered only a decade later.
“Duncan did his best,” my mother says beside me. “He really did.”
“I know,” I tell her, granting her this fiction.
“I wish he could have lived to see you reopen the Watchman.”
All I’ve done so far is pass the keys to Ben Tate, who has a skeleton staff downtown, setting up tomorrow’s edition. Ben’s more than a little pissed that I’ve restrained him from going hard after the Poker Club, and I can foresee problems in hewing to the deal I made with Buckman. But right now Ben is content to focus on the murders of Buck and Sally, as well as the imminent arrival of the Department of Archives and History archaeologists who will assess the paper mill site.
“We’ll do it tomorrow in style,” I tell her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take that portrait of Dad from your bedroom and hang it in the lobby of the building.”
This takes her by surprise, and moves her deeply. I have seen other widows become faithful tenders of their husbands’ legacies. “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” she says. To hide her tears, Mom changes the subject. “I’ve heard Buck Ferris’s memorial is tomorrow afternoon, out at the cemetery. Do you plan to go?”
“Sure, of course. I didn’t know.”