How many nights has Paul lain awake and wondered if he’s losing Jet, or has already lost her? Has he wondered how his son would react to his mother leaving the house? Maybe even leaving the state? Who could possibly take Jet’s place? A hundred local women would be happy to move into her house and give their best years to Paul. But how many could fill the massive hole that her departure would create? None of them. I know what it’s like to try to replace Jet Talal. I tried, and with a damn good woman. But even she never quite banished Jet from my mind and heart.
“Dying doesn’t scare me,” Paul says softly, still looking at the floor.
A chill races over my arms. “What?”
“Dying doesn’t scare me. In fact, there’ve been times when I would have welcomed it.” He looks up, his face scarlet from hanging his head over like that. “Don’t freak out, I’m not about to slit my wrists. I’m just saying, I’ve seen death up close. You know that. You saw some with me.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s dying alone, man.”
“Now you’re talking crazy.”
“Am I? My mother’s gone, Goose. She’d dead. My father may have killed her. And Jet? Who knows, man? I feel like she’s miles away, even when we’re sitting across the table from each other. Even when I’m inside her. She’s just . . . not there.”
I breathe slowly, keeping my face immobile. “Maybe that’s just in your mind.”
He shakes his head with conviction. “No! I’m not saying I blame her. I’ve got all kinds of problems. Head problems, dick problems—which drugs don’t always help—but mostly anxiety. And my temper. I can’t keep my shit in one sock. Sometimes, I’ll be at one of Kevin’s baseball games, and some asshole parent will start trash-talking a ref or even a kid. In less than a second I’m one tick from walking over and snapping the dude’s neck. It’s like my mind goes red, my brain’s on fire. I don’t carry a knife anymore, because I’m worried I might decapitate some asshole in the time it takes to cover three rows of bleachers.”
I get up and walk around my desk, sit on its top. “Paul, you know what that is. PTSD. You’ve got to talk to somebody.”
He looks up with irony in his eyes. “Ain’t we talkin’?”
“Yeah. But you came in here to ask if I’m fucking your wife.”
“Are you?”
This time his gaze is piercing. I don’t even allow myself internal dialogue before I give him a reflexive “No.”
His stare doesn’t waver. “You used to, though.”
“Yeah, in high school. Ancient history, man.”
He nods slowly. “You must have tapped it a few times since then. Right? College? She come up to UVA for a weekend? D.C., maybe?”
Did he put Jet through this kind of grilling? If so, what did she answer? “Paul, goddamn it. This is pointless.”
At last he breaks eye contact and looks at the floor again. “Don’t mind me. I’ll get out.”
“You don’t have to. Tell me about Kevin,” I say, hoping to steer him to more solid ground.
Sure enough, when Paul looks up, five years have fallen from his face. “He’s awesome, man. Not just an athlete. He’s smart, like Adam was. You know?”
“Yeah, I know. I bet the girls love him, too.”
Paul’s eyes shine. “Oh, yeah. He makes me remember how good we had it back then.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Yeah. Only . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t say this. But he spends so much time with my dad that I don’t see him like I used to. This goddamn traveling baseball team? Max is obsessed with it. He bought the team an RV, and he drives it everywhere. And I see all those boys looking at him like some kind of hero—which you and I know he’s not.”
“No, he’s not.”
“But they don’t know that, see?” Paul’s eyes fill with the intensity of a man incapable of expressing some deeply felt conviction. “The problem is I think Kevin senses I’m not exactly stable right now. I feel like he gravitates to Max because he’s not sure I’m solid.”
What hell has this man been living in? How did Jet ever believe we could move to D.C. and take Kevin with us? Paul wouldn’t survive that. We might not survive it, either, if he chose to vent his anger before killing himself. In fact, he would likely kill us to remove the possibility that Kevin could be taken away—
“I’m gonna go,” he says, getting to his feet. “Sorry about ambushing you like this. I just didn’t know what to think.”
“You don’t have to worry, man. Not about me.”
I can’t believe I just spoke those words knowing that Max still possesses the video of Jet and me on the patio.
“Hey,” he says. “Just promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“I’m not gonna find out a week from now that this was all bullshit, right? That you just didn’t want to tell me the truth?”
I feel as though my body has turned to lead. Somewhere deep in my mind, far behind the frozen mask of my face, a rogue impulse whispers, Tell him. Tell him the truth. The whole truth. Tell him you love Jet, but that you love him, too. Because he knows that’s true—
“Goose?” he says hesitantly.
Even as I answer, I know a moment will come in the future when we face each other again and he’ll know that I lied today, as Jet lied—that we did not grant him the respect he deserves. That moment may mean death for us all.
“I promise, man. Now get out of here and go take a pill or something. You’ve got to sleep. You’re going to drive into a bridge abutment.”
He laughs again. “If I do, tell Byron Ellis it was sleep deprivation. Get me off the hook.”
“Goddamn it, Paul—”
“Just kidding.” Without warning he takes two steps and throws his arms around me, hugs me the way he did in Ramadi, after we made it out of the city and climbed out of the Mamba. He stinks of Scotch and old sweat, and though almost thirty years have passed, his smell is as familiar to me as my own, from a hundred dressing rooms, football fields, and basketball courts across Mississippi.
“Thanks, man,” he says. “Later.”
And then he’s gone.
An enervating wave of exhaustion rolls over me. Is this how actors feel after delivering an immortal performance? Jet must be sitting with her phone clenched in her hand, waiting to hear what happened. Before heading back to Ben’s office to get my burner phone, I unlock my file cabinet and remove the hard copy of the PDF file I received this morning. Then I carry it down to Ben’s office, where I nearly bump into him on his way to the newsroom.
“What’s this?” he asks when I hand him the stack of pages.
“Your first Pulitzer. The start of it, anyway. Don’t show it to anybody else. We’ll talk after you’ve read it.”
He holds my gaze long enough to be sure I’m serious, then walks back into his office and locks the papers in his desk. Opening the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, he takes out my burner phone and the Walther.