Cemetery Road Page 19

  I had no contact with them for the next thirteen years, unless you count a sympathy card I got after my son drowned. Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2010, but he was angry and defensive about it, and Mom thought I should let her try to handle him alone as long as possible. His initial disease progression was slow, so it was 2016 before I started making trips back to Mississippi. And it was only after his rapid slide began in 2017 that my trips became regular. I was bound to run into Jet eventually, but it didn’t happen until Christmas 2017. Five months ago.

  Last Christmas Eve, I tried to have a frank discussion with Dad about his medical prognosis. I also tried to talk to him about the future of the Watchman, which carried enormous debt and was losing more money every month. Dad was combative, and he might have gotten violent if I hadn’t decided to take a break and buy Mom a Christmas present while she tried to settle him down. I was standing in the checkout line at Dillard’s department store (with an expensive glass tub of moisturizer in my hand) when Jet tapped me on the shoulder, then laughed out loud when I turned and became a cartoon caricature of surprise.

  Her eleven-year-old son, Kevin, stood at her side. The boy was handsome, like his father and grandfather (and his asshole cousins). The Matheson traits ran deeply in him. He had the strong jaw and high cheekbones, the vaguely Aryan look. But Jet had left her mark in his skin, which was darker than Paul’s had ever been, and in his eyes, which were large and brown. Also, Kevin was tall for eleven, which I suspected had come more from Jet than from Paul.

  Jet herself amazed me. Buck’s description of her as an Arabic Emmylou Harris had proved prescient; she’d aged every bit as gracefully as the singer. She was forty-five then, but except for a few tiny lines around her eyes and mouth, slightly wider hips, and a heavier bosom, she could have been the girl I spent the summer riding bikes with in 1986. We traded small talk while we checked out, but then she told Kevin to go look for some new tennis shoes. As soon as the boy vanished, her mask slipped. She asked about my father again, and I gave her a more honest assessment. Then I asked how she was really doing.

  “It’s hard,” she said softly, averting her eyes. “Paul’s been unhappy for a long time.”

  “Unhappy with what? Life? You? What?”

  “All the above.” Then she looked back at me. “How are you really doing? I wrote you a long letter after . . . you know. But I didn’t mail it. It was too personal.”

  She meant my son’s death, I supposed. I waved my hand to move the conversation along.

  “So you’re divorced,” she said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “And very popular, I’m sure. Are you seeing anyone?”

  I shrugged. “There’s somebody.”

  She forced a smile then. “Serious?”

  The silence that followed this question was one of the most pregnant moments of my life. “Define serious.”

  She held up her left hand and tapped her wedding ring with her painted thumbnail.

  “No,” I said. “Not soon, anyway. Your son looks really great, by the way,” I told her, trying to change the subject. “He looks like you.”

  “Oh, he’s something. Paul and Max already have him playing every sport ever invented. They send him off to special camps, and he’s on a traveling baseball team. I think he’s too young for all that.”

  “He is a Matheson,” I pointed out.

  She let out a long sigh. “About three-quarters Matheson, I’d say. I may have a quarter of him. That’s what keeps me sane.”

  In that moment I saw the deep pain working inside her. “Do you have a friend?” I asked. “A good one?”

  She gave me a wistful smile. “Not really. Not a close one. You know me. Too private.”

  “Does Paul realize how unhappy you are?”

  “If so, he doesn’t do anything to help. I think he knows he can’t. Not where it counts. His mother’s been kind to me. Sally. She has some sense of the position I’m in. Being Max’s wife all these years had to be tough. She’s empathetic. But the rest of them, Max and their redneck cousins from Jackson—”

  “I remember the cousins,” I said, thinking of the night we climbed the electrical tower.

  “They were there when Adam drowned, weren’t they?” she asked. “In the river?”

  I nodded, forcing my mind away from Dooley and Trey Matheson.

  “So will you be coming down more often? To help take care of your dad?”

  “I think so. More to help with the paper, really. It’s been going down fast.”

  “I’m sorry. It has gotten a little . . . rickety. But I’m not sorry to hear I might see more of you.”

  And there it was.

  After that day, I knew that if I came back to Bienville, Jet would come to me. Even if I didn’t ask her to. Even if we resisted consummation, fate would unfold in that direction. And from that moment, this knowledge began to work on me. I felt like Jay Gatsby staring at the stupid green light across the bay. The truth I had denied for decades finally rose to the surface and would not be denied any longer.

  I had wanted her for so long. Even during the first year of my marriage, when my new wife filled most of my conscious mind, a faintly glowing anima remained in the dark chamber where Jordan Elat Talal had resided since I was fourteen years old. The farthest I ever got from Jet was probably the two years that my son was alive. Baby Adam soothed the unquiet ghosts of my youth, stilled the restless desire that no other woman but Jet had quenched.

  But after he died, my world emptied out, as though all life had been poured from it. I became a ghost myself, moving noiselessly through my days, hardly noticed, noticing nothing. To my surprise, as I retreated inward, I discovered that the inmost chamber of my mind still had its tenant. Even more surprising, that chamber held warmth as well as memories, and life was so cold then that I was glad to huddle inside it. Eventually, my work brought me back to the world. Yet somehow, during every relationship I pursued, Jet was always there, a silent measuring stick for every woman I got close to.

  Yet I never reached toward her. Before marrying Paul, she had made two pilgrimages north to try to save me from myself—and to save herself from compromise. Both times, I let pride stop me from seizing the chance. I’d never seen myself as a passive person, but after feeling the surge of life that hit me in that Christmas checkout line, I realized that my lack of initiative with Jet was probably a clue to why I’d spent my life reporting the news rather than making it.

  By the time I got back to Washington after that Christmas trip, I’d resolved to move back to Bienville. I had a hell of a rationalization to obscure my baser motive. Trying to both care for Dad and run the Watchman had worn my mother down to a shadow of herself. If my brother had been alive, he would have moved home at least a year earlier. In fact, Adam probably would have moved home as soon as Dad was diagnosed. But I’ve never had Adam’s impulse for sacrifice. Even with the situation critical, the decision was tough for me. To leave Washington for an extended period, I would have to unwind my TV deal with MSNBC and take a leave of absence from the Post. The sources I’d cultivated over decades—who were paying off in spades during the Trump administration—I would have to pass off to trusted colleagues and, in one case, to a competitor. With my career plugged into the 220-volt main line, I was going to have to short-circuit my professional dream, probably for months and maybe a year. I might never regain that kind of juice again. But I had to do it. For my mother, I told myself.

  Jet and I held out for two months after I arrived. During that time, I learned just how she’d kept herself busy—and sane—in our old hometown. Despite marrying into money, she had diligently practiced law since her return, usually representing underdogs against corporate employers or insurance companies. She’d also founded the most successful charter school in Mississippi. And not a typical one. Reliant Charter was no public school for white kids, but rather a highly effective institution that was being used as a model by three other Southern states.

  The fir
st time Jet and I were alone after my return, I was interviewing her about a proposed expansion at Reliant. As she faced me across my father’s desk at the Watchman, we acted out a scene of platonic friendship, avoiding eye contact and blushing whenever other people walked into the room. The second time—when she came over for a follow-up story two weeks later—it was in the same office, but later in the day. The paper was a little quieter. After an awkward, stammering couple of minutes, Jet turned and locked my door, then walked around my desk and kissed me.

  I kissed her back. The voices from the newsroom outside faded. Thirty seconds later, I unbuttoned her blouse and began kissing her breasts. With every second that passed, a year fell away. A low purling sound came from her throat, and she took hold of my hand and pressed it between her legs. Her slacks were soaked through. In that moment we were fourteen years old again, standing in the Weldons’ barn. My office ceased to exist. I slid my hand up, then down under her waistband, and a familiar shock went through me. There was the coarse, abundant hair I remembered from the barn and from senior year. I pushed my fingers into the thick tangle and squeezed, pulling the hair away from her skin.

  “I grew it out for you,” she whispered.

  “When did you start?”

  She bit my earlobe and grabbed my belt buckle. “That night at the department store. Last Christmas.”

  After that, we were lost. Since that afternoon, we’ve hardly gone a day without making love. I let my Washington connections wither to nothing—on both the professional and romantic fronts—while Jet began exploring the practical realities of divorce. The problem, as is so often the case in Bienville, is the Poker Club. Divorces and child custody decisions in Mississippi fall under the jurisdiction of chancery judges. Tenisaw County has two. And the chance of Max Matheson allowing either one to grant Jet the right to move his grandson to D.C. is zero. Jet is a brilliant attorney, but even she has found no way to cut the knot that binds her to her old life.

  At a quarter till four, Jet walks out of my woods with her usual long-limbed grace. She’s no longer wearing the sundress she had on earlier, but dark slacks and a white blouse. I’m not sure at first whether she realizes I’m watching her from the patio. The steamer chaise sits lower than my other chairs, which probably does a lot to conceal me. But she knows. She announces this by unbuttoning her blouse as she crosses the grass, then shrugging it off her shoulders and letting it fall as she walks on. Ten steps farther across the freshly mown field, her bra drops to the ground. I assumed she would show up in a very different mood, ready to comfort me for the loss of Buck and discuss the implications of Paul’s suspicion. She may do that yet. But if so, she means to do it naked. By the time she’s ten yards from the patio, she’s wearing nothing but the silver pendant necklace and sapphire earrings I saw at the groundbreaking.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she says, standing over the chaise with an expression I cannot read. “I had a couple of issues.”

  “It’s okay,” I reply, starting to get up.

  She holds up one long-fingered hand in a stop gesture. “Did I make a mistake with my clothes?”

  I shake my head, reach up with my right hand.

  Instead of taking it, she turns away, cups the cheeks of her bottom in each hand, and pulls them apart. The sight is shockingly erotic. “Are you going to invite me to sit down?” she asks.

  “Please sit down.”

  She looks back over her shoulder and smiles at last. “Why don’t you get those pants off first?”

  Chapter 18

  Ten minutes ago, Jet sat astride me on the steamer chaise and worked with focused intensity, reaching her first release in two minutes. Then, with barely a pause, she started again, the second time making sure that I fell into rhythm with her, so that I would finish when she did. A sheen of sweat shone on her dark chest, and her eyes dilated as they sometimes do, losing focus as she approached her second orgasm. Her hands gripped my shoulders, her nails dug painfully into the skin, but I made no sound of complaint.

  Afterward, she fell forward and nestled her face in my neck without speaking. Given Buck’s murder, this isn’t what I’d expected of our first few minutes alone, but it’s what I needed. Talking to Quinn took a lot out of me, and the last thing I wanted from Jet was more talk. For her part, carrying on an affair in her hometown is exhausting. Each rendezvous requires a carefully planned escape from the tyranny of routine, involving excuses, outright lies, occasional car changes, and constant vigilance. Unexpected crises like Buck’s murder only add to the burden. But why talk about it? Words become superfluous when every cell in your body is telling you to leap into the frantic fusion of sex and discharge all your anxiety in one frenzied rush.

  After breathing into my neck for a couple of minutes, she says, “Are you really okay?”

  “I’m kind of freaked out, honestly.”

  “Because of Buck? Or Paul?”

  “Both. But seeing Buck pulled out of that river started it.”

  She flattens her hands on the frame of the chaise and presses herself up far enough to look into my eyes. “You saw his body?”

  I nod.

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough.”

  She lowers her head and kisses my forehead. “I never told you this, but when Paul and I first moved back to Bienville, I ran into Buck one day at LaSalle Park. We sat on a bench and talked for a while, just him and me. This was before I’d had Kevin. In his shy and courtly way, Buck told me that he’d always believed you and I would end up together.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him that I’d always loved you, but it just wasn’t in the stars.” Jet laughs, her eyes shining. “How’s that for cliché?”

  “I guess Buck was right after all.”

  “You bet your ass he was. And I’ve never been happier to be wrong.”

  “I thought you were never wrong.”

  She pinches the soft flesh inside my left thigh, and I curse in pain. Before I can pay her back, she flips off the chaise and scrambles to her feet.

  “Shouldn’t we talk about Paul and your fight?” I ask.

  “We will. I need to pee. Do you want me to come back out here?”

  “No, I’ll come with you.”

  I follow her to the master bathroom, meaning to tease her a little, but as we walk down the narrow hallway, I see her transitioning from postcoital languor to purposeful intent. It’s in the straightness of her back, the level set of her shoulders. She’s got murder on her mind now.

  My back bathroom is larger than what usually comes with an older house. The elderly couple who owned the place before me expanded the room so that the husband, who was wheelchair-bound when I met him, could shower in it. As I pick up a couple of stray socks, Jet begins urinating behind the small partition that shields the commode.

  “Hey,” she calls. “You feel like putting on some coffee? It’s going to be a long night with that party.”

  “Sure.”

  I pull on jeans and a T-shirt, then walk back to the kitchen and pop a K-Cup into the Keurig. For the first time since this morning, the weight of Buck’s loss has lifted slightly from my shoulders. Spending myself in Jet has reset my neurotransmitters, at least for the moment. Had I been able to see her alone this morning, I might not have been sucked into the whirlpool of flashbacks that Buck’s death triggered.

  A thin stream of coffee begins to drip from the Keurig, and the welcome scent fills the kitchen. I wonder at her ability to heal me this way. For three months I have felt this peace, after decades of yearning for her. What is the essence of that connection? A thirty-year-old fold in my cerebral cortex? Is the first neural imprinting of love and sex so deep that nothing ever supplants it? Like the music you listened to during those years? No matter how I analyze it, this reality remains: being with Jet is a necessity, an involuntary compulsion like breathing. Except that I managed to live without her, with only the memory of air, for nearly three decades. I held my breath and pretended to live.
Somehow, the memory of this woman sustained me, even through my grief over my son. Now that I have her once more, I don’t ever want to stop breathing again.

  Jet’s sock feet hiss on the hardwood of the hallway. Wearing my ancient orange Cavaliers T-shirt, she pads over to me, kisses my shoulder, then leans back on the kitchen island to wait for her coffee.

  “Three things,” she says. “First, Paul asked me about last Thursday.”

  I shake my head blankly. “Last Thursday?”

  “Yesterday he ran into Claire Maloney, who I was supposed to have run with last Thursday. I was out here, of course. Claire’s kind of ditzy—that’s why I used her for my excuse—so I got away with it. But Paul noted the disconnect. I realized I had really pushed the envelope.”

  “Are you sure he believed you?”

  “I think so. But that wasn’t all.”

  My mouth goes dry.

  “Breathe,” she says, looking up at me. “The second thing was Josh, which is just ridiculous. Paul didn’t have any specific reason to suspect Josh. I think he’s just picked up that I’ve emotionally checked out of the marriage, and he knows I spend hours a day with Josh—even out of town. So he’s the first target of suspicion.”

  “You said he mentioned me.”

  She shifts uncomfortably. “Yeah. This is the sticky part.”

  “Tell me!”

  “He asked why I’d grown my pubic hair back all of a sudden.”

  “All of a sudden? Didn’t you grow it out before I moved back?”

  “Just before. So I’ve had it back for six months. But I kept it shaved for twenty years. From Paul’s point of view, that’s sudden.”