“I’d like to go with you. Buck did this family a great service.”
That he did. “We’ll go together.”
As she turns the album’s pages, I see the shining faces of people I haven’t spoken to in years. Bienville children who grew up and spread across the country, though most remained in the South. In every photograph, the kids seem oriented in relation to Adam, like bodies of lesser density finding their position in relation to a star.
“That boy was something,” Mom says softly. “Wasn’t he?”
“He was.”
As she slowly turns the pages, moving through Christmas presents and Fourth of July firecrackers, I remember Tim Hayden talking to me in the little park up the street from Nadine’s bookstore. “Mom, can I ask you something personal?”
“About your father?”
“No, Adam.”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever wonder if he might be gay?”
“Adam?”
I instantly regret the question.
Mom lays her hands flat on the plastic-covered album pages, draws back her head, and looks at me. “What makes you ask that?”
“I . . . never mind. I just wondered.”
After a few moments, she smiles in a way I’ve never seen before, defenselessly, as though allowing her deepest self to become manifest on her face. “Of course he was,” she says. “Your father never knew. I don’t think Duncan could have handled it. Not back then. Although . . . for him, Adam could do no wrong. I suppose that would have tested his love.”
“How long have you known?” I ask.
“Oh, I suspected when he was a little boy. Never mind why. Mothers know these things, if they pay attention. They don’t always react well, of course. But they know. At least I did.”
“Did you ever talk to anybody about it?”
Another smile touches her mouth and eyes, this one wistful. “Jenny Anderson,” she says. “His girlfriend from junior and senior year. About ten years ago, she was in town for Christmas, and she stopped by to see me. Jenny knew. And she loved him like we did. For what he was. All he was.”
“I must be blind,” I murmur, feeling ashamed.
“We’re all blind about some things. Different things for each of us. That’s what makes life so hard.”
I lean back on the sofa, and Mom lays her hand on my knee. “I’m not teasing you now, Marshall. You know who reminds me of Jenny Anderson? Nadine. That young lady has a pure heart and an old soul. I hope you’re not blind to that.”
Before I can answer, my burner phone pings in my pocket.
“Excuse me a sec, Mom. This is work.” I get up and take the phone out of my pocket, feeling her gaze on me as I walk to the door. Looking down at the screen, I see a text from Jet: Have to see you ASAP. I know it’s worst possible time, but this is an emergency. Things falling apart. Leaving for your house now. I’ll park in the woods till you let me know it’s ok to approach house. So sorry about your dad!
“Is everything all right?” Mom calls.
“Yes,” I tell her, leaning back through the wide door. “It’s just work. Would you be all right if I had to leave for about an hour?”
She nods without speaking, but in her eyes I see the knowledge granted by her phenomenal perception. “Be careful,” she says. “That blindness we were talking about gets people hurt.”
This is as close as she’ll ever come to warning me away from Jet.
“I will, Mom. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Five minutes ago I watched Jet walk from the tree line to my patio for the third time this week. As she did, I thought about all that’s happened since she shed her clothes on the same walk three days ago. We live in a different world now—so different that had she stripped while making that walk today, I would have worried she’d lost her mind. As she walked, swiftly today, her gaze on the ground, I wasn’t thinking about Max, or Paul, or even my father. I was thinking about my conversation with Tallulah Williams. Oddly, I also remembered how Jet left her earrings in my bathroom two days ago, as a test. She’d wanted to know whether Nadine would find them there. A human gesture, obviously. But it bothered me more than I’d realized at the time.
She sits before me now with a haunted face, her dark, long-fingered hands flat on the kitchen table. It’s odd to have a table between us, but today it seems appropriate. Something about this visit seems formal, even forced. I have a feeling she’s about to tell me why I feel that way.
“Max sent me here,” Jet says simply.
“I thought he was in the hospital in Jackson.”
“He is. He called me from his room at UMC.”
“Max made you come here?”
She nods. “He told me that if I didn’t, he would tell Paul and Kevin that he’s Kevin’s father.”
My God. The man is lying half-dead in a critical care hospital, and he’s still applying pressure to the object of his obsession.
“Why did he want you to come here?”
Jet closes her eyes, sighs heavily. “Do you know what it’s like to carry a secret that can destroy your life? Your whole family? I’ve heard people describe it as dragging a weight, but it’s not like that. It’s more internal than that. I used to feel it like a tumor inside me, one that could turn malignant any time. Or an aneurysm that could burst. But that’s not really it, either. Do you know what it’s like?”
“No.”
“An explosive vest. I strapped it on thirteen years ago, and Max has the detonator. I’ve been wearing this fucking thing for thirteen years, waiting for it to go off, and the man with the detonator has been slowly going mad.”
I’ve never seen Jet in this much pain. How did she mask it for so long? I want to comfort her, but I have no idea how to go about it.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says. “I feel like I’m about to knife you in the heart. Or myself. I don’t know if this feels more like homicide or suicide.”
Jet reminds me of my wife in the pit of postpartum depression. There’s a deadness to her voice that I couldn’t have imagined until I heard it. And all the light has been sucked from her eyes.
“Let me try to make this easier for you,” I say gently. “I think I know what you’re about to tell me.”
“How could you?”
“I spoke to Tallulah this morning.”
“Tallulah?” Jet looks blank. “What about?”
“She’s an observant woman.”
Jet shrugs and shakes her head in puzzlement. “What did she ‘observe’?”
“Well . . . nothing terrible, or even untoward. She just described to me a feeling that she had.”
A sudden alertness in Jet’s posture tells me she’s made the connection. “Oh,” she says softly. “Oh.”
“Did you come here to tell me that Max never raped you?”
Her chin begins to quiver, and her eyes close. Even her hands are shivering.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I say, meaning it as a kindness. “I have no idea what you were going through then. It had to be a terrible time.”