“I’d prefer to tell you,” she replies, her voice braced with iron. “If you can listen. It’s not what you think. Nothing like what you must think.”
What can she mean? “Did he rape you?”
She looks stricken. “No.”
“Then . . . what should I think?”
“Will you please listen to me? Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
I nod slowly. “I’m listening.”
Jet takes two deep breaths, then licks her lips like someone about to read aloud from a book. “The situation was pretty much as I described last night. Though Paul was, if anything, in worse shape than I let on. He had constant pain from his head wounds. He was addicted to Oxycontin. Warren Lacey wrote prescriptions for whatever he wanted, but Paul also bought street drugs from a worker at the sawmill. I think the multiple IED concussions had profoundly affected his brain. He would fly into rages, he was impotent nearly all the time, and he refused to seek help for any of it.”
“And you?”
“I did what women always do. I blamed myself.”
“Why?”
“For marrying him.”
I feel like we’re retracing old steps. “You said that last night. That you married a man you didn’t love. But I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. Or me. You feel that way now, but not when you walked down the aisle.”
Frustration etches itself into her face. “You’re so wrong, Marshall. Did I not come to you in D.C. only weeks before Paul proposed to me? Did I not ask if there was a chance for us?”
“Yes . . . sort of. But you waited until you were right at the edge of the cliff.”
Anger flashes in her eyes. “I still did it. That’s more than you did. But you shut me down. You slept with me, of course. But you let me know you weren’t ready to deal with it in a real way. With us.”
“I wasn’t ready. What was the hurry?”
“We were twenty-eight! Not eighteen.”
I turn up my hands on the table. “To tell you the truth, I was still hurt by you going back to Paul after college. I assumed you wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t love him.”
Jet’s gaze flits over the surface of the table, as though she’s looking for crumbs that need sweeping up. “I’ve come to realize something,” she says. “Marrying someone you don’t love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you’ve done, the damage you’ve caused by forcing you both to live a lie.”
Her words take me back to my own marriage. “I see the truth in that. I’ve lived that. But that sounds like a lot of marriages, Jet. Wilde said the one charm of marriage was that it made a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
“Glib and depressing.”
“Why don’t we focus on you and Max?”
“There is no me and Max! There never was.” Though Jet’s outward affect is melancholy, I sense fearsome anger beneath. “What happened was simple, pragmatic, utilitarian. By 2005, Paul and I had been trying to have a baby for four years—since before he went to Afghanistan after 9/11. All through his rotations home, even when he had that stupid contracting company in Iraq. After one year of failure, I got myself thoroughly checked out. My plumbing was fine. But Paul refused to get even the most basic fertility tests on himself.”
“That I believe.”
“He’d tried to kill himself twice that I know of in that time. He pretended both episodes were accidental overdoses, but I knew. He was about to become another VA statistic. I really believed a baby was the only thing that might save him. He wouldn’t consider adoption, and if I’d mentioned a sperm donor, he’d have killed me. The thing is, even though I knew the situation wasn’t my fault—the infertility, I mean—I felt like a failure.”
Sitting here listening to Jet, I think of how people in the town see her—smart, tough, put together, in control—the mother of an athlete destined to become a star. No one could imagine the life she’s describing to me now.
“So . . . what did you do?”
Something changes in her voice, an alteration in pitch that renders it more mechanical, less human. “It happened a lot like I told you last night. Sally was ill after surgery. I’d been taking care of her, but it was Tallulah in the bedroom with her that night. Max and I were in their living room, by a fire. We’d all been drinking. Paul was passed out twenty feet away.”
“And?”
“Max asked me what was wrong with Paul. He could see his son dying before his eyes. Killing himself. He said he didn’t blame me, but he wondered why we hadn’t had any kids. He said Paul refused to talk to him about it.”
“So you told Max the truth.”
Jet nods. “He listened. He didn’t say anything for a while. I just sat there, drunk, wondering what the endpoint of all this was. I was very near getting in my car and driving away from that family. I think Max knew that. Sally certainly did. She’d already begged me not to go.”
At last, I realize, I’m hearing the truth.
“Max just threw it out there,” she says suddenly. “I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘Hell, if the problem’s that you can’t get pregnant, we can solve that easily enough. No use anybody dying over that.’ I just stared at him, trying to understand what he meant. I know it sounds sleazy, but . . . it wasn’t like you think. Max wasn’t creepy or lechy about it or anything. Not back then. It was a calculated solution. A transaction. Like, ‘If this is what needs to happen to give Paul a chance, then let’s make it happen.’”
I can’t believe how reasonable it sounds. Maybe from the outside, someone would think she was crazy. But when I put myself in her place, I can almost understand it. “Go on,” I say gently. “I’m not judging you. Seriously. Did you sleep with him that night?”
“No. I thought about it for twenty-four hours. The truth is, I’d considered desperate options before. I’d thought about going to New Orleans and picking up some stranger in a bar. Telling him a different name and having sex with him. But the risks of that just seemed insane.”
Compared to sleeping with your father-in-law? I ask silently.
“I’d also considered asking a male friend to help me. But I didn’t have any male friends I could ask that of. You, maybe. But you weren’t exactly a friend.”
“No. And there’s the resemblance factor.”
Her eyes flash. “Exactly. Any resemblance to you, Paul would have seen in a minute. I think that’s what settled my decision. Because if the baby looked like Max, there’d be no problem. Everybody would simply say he looked like his grandfather, which is the most natural thing in the world. From a logistical point of view, the plan was perfect.”
“But from a psychological one, a nightmare.”
She sighs deeply. “I know that now. The thing is, Marshall . . . it worked. For the first nine or ten years. Max wasn’t weird about it at all. He was a sperm donor, that’s it. Once I was pregnant, he played his role perfectly. And as I told you last night, Kevin was Paul’s salvation. The whole family’s, really.”