Carthage (54 page)

(Of course, Zeno was a solitary drinker, too. But no one knew.)

(No one knew? Not likely.)

It began to be a—kind of a—floating weirdness: a gaping emptiness beyond Zeno’s foot shy-groping on a flight of stairs
down
.

As if, if all of his senses weren’t sharp-alert, he’d lose consciousness, lose balance and
down-fall.

Saying to Arlette, as if their argument had been smoldering underground like those subterranean fuel-fields in a blistered Pennsylvania landscape smoldering for decades, “If you forgive him, you are insulting those of us who love her. You are insulting
her
.”

He was shaking. Such resentment he felt for this mild-mannered woman his wife, such sudden hatred, a shock to Zeno as to her.

“Zeno, no. Forgiveness is an individual choice. If you chose to hate Brett Kincaid rather than forgive him—I mean ‘forgive’ him in some way—that is your prerogative. You can’t know what our daughter would have wanted. By now, she might have forgiven Brett herself.”

It was a brave tremulous speech. Guessing how close her husband was to grasping her shoulders and shake-shake-shaking her, in husbandly indignation.

“That’s bullshit, Arlette. Kincaid hurt her, and then he drowned her. Her tossed our daughter away like garbage.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know how much of his confession was ‘true.’ His memory has been damaged. We’ve discussed this.”

Discussed.
This was an understatement.

As the father of the victim Zeno had been astonished—you might say outraged, furious—that observers assumed a right to have opinions on the case; assumed a right to comment, some of them in print, that Corporal Brett Kincaid hadn’t been of sufficiently sound mind to understand the criminal charges against him and to participate in his defense; still more, hadn’t been of sufficiently sound mind to have committed any crime. And whether the charge brought by the prosecutor after negotiating with the defense attorney should have been second-degree murder, or manslaughter.

Others believed that Kincaid had committed a vicious brutal murder and that the prosecutor was being overly lenient in allowing him to plead guilty to reduced charges of manslaughter.

Some might have wished for Kincaid to be sentenced to death. But Zeno was not one of these.

For Zeno didn’t believe in the death penalty. Even for the vicious brutal murderer of his daughter.

As to the matter of Kincaid being capable of participating in his own defense and knowing “right from wrong”—Beechum County sheriff’s deputies had testified that Kincaid had lied to them when he’d been first apprehended and brought to headquarters; he’d made an effort to “cover up his crime”—“to mislead.” This is a principle in criminal law, that a perpetrator who tries to cover up his crime has understood that he has committed a crime: one who seeks to “mislead” understands that he has a reason for doing so.

In Nathan Brede’s courtroom, Brett Kincaid had not spoken in his own behalf. His expression of “remorse” like his plea of guilty had been communicated by his attorney while the shackled corporal stood mute and staring into space like a dangerous beast brought to bay, and now but a piteous sight.

Zeno had no doubt, Kincaid was guilty. No doubt, Kincaid should be sentenced to prison for a long time.

Voluntary manslaughter
was a weak indictment.
Fifteen to twenty years
meant eligibility for parole in seven years. Zeno knew this, and Zeno was sickened by the knowledge. But Zeno knew not to object publicly: he would not rant for TV cameras like a tormented bear on his hind legs. He would not provide an entertaining spectacle for the insatiable news media.

Yet, as a lawyer, Zeno knew: there remained the prevailing question of the corporal’s confession through seven hours of police interrogation, with no lawyer present. (No lawyer because Kincaid had refused a lawyer.) How authentic was this confession? How could its details be corroborated? Had it been coerced? Had there been others who’d participated in an assault upon the victim that had begun at the lake? In the parking lot of the Roebuck Inn?—or had the assault taken place entirely in the Nautauga Preserve, with Brett Kincaid the sole assailant? Zeno had been allowed to view much of the original interview with Kincaid through a TV monitor, at the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d been allowed to examine the videotapes not all of which were entirely coherent, audible. This experience he would later describe in semi-drunken
noir
-humor as an experience not unlike seeing his guts dragged out of him, twisted, stabbed and burnt as he observed, if such exquisite torture could be protracted for seven hours and the victim still reasonably conscious.

Yes. Zeno could see that the young man who’d confessed to murdering his daughter was sincerely repentant. You could see that Kincaid was repelled by his own physical being like a rabid creature about to tear at itself with its teeth. But this did not make Corporal Kincaid less guilty in Zeno’s eyes. It did not make Zeno hate him less, or feel in any way inclined to
forgive
.

It had been rumored that Corporal Brett Kincaid had provided information against certain of his fellow platoon-comrades, in Iraq; that he’d participated in an army investigation into atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers against Iraqi citizens; that some or all of his injuries might have been the result of his providing testimony, and that he’d had to be hurriedly dispatched out of his platoon, out of Iraq, to prevent his being killed. None of these rumors was ever substantiated and when Zeno Mayfield tried to discover what had happened, both directly and by way of what Zeno wanted to think was a high-ranking personal contact at the Department of Veteran Affairs in Washington, D.C., he’d been informed that there was no such investigation on record: no charges had been filed against anyone in Corporal Kincaid’s platoon.

Meaning—what? That the U.S. Army had buried the investigation, or that there’d never been an investigation? That Corporal Kincaid had been injured by the Iraqi enemy, or by his own comrades? Or both?

AFTER THE INITIAL INTERVIEWS
when it had seemed that Cressida was merely
missing,
and that their public appeals might be of help in finding her, the Mayfields never gave another.

After Evvie Estes contacted them one too many times Zeno told her bluntly
No more. We’re done with entertaining.

FELT NO DESIRE
for his wife, or any woman.

His only desire was for—(he knew: an insipid fantasy)—the restoration of all he’d lost though at the time of his losing it, in July 2005, he’d had but a vague awareness of its vast unfathomable worth; and of his own worth, mirrored in it.

Consoling himself, these solitary evenings when Arlette was “out”—(carefully she’d explained where she was, which volunteer organization, or which women-friends)—with a smudged tumbler of whiskey and
The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Belatedly he would realize: even Arlette’s sickness had been an estrangement between them. An occasion for estrangement.

Where once such a personal, physical crisis would have drawn them together more intimately, as in the intense, emotion-rife days preceding and following the births of their daughters years ago, now the discovery that Arlette “had” cancer was like an elbow in the husband’s ribs nudging him aside.

So Zeno felt. All the more reason then in his suspended-terror state to have an occasional (surreptitious, at-home) drink. Just one.

Or maybe, one and a half.

(For who would know?)

(Not Arlette in her life ever more tight-scheduled like a cobweb of maniacal precision in which, the husband was given to know, his anxious presence was a detriment and not a blessing.)

For from the first discovery of a tiny lump in Arlette’s left breast through a sequence of mammograms, CAT scans, biopsy and surgery—the grueling regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, and medication that stretched on for more than six months in the late summer, fall and winter of 2006 to 2007—it hadn’t been her husband in whom she’d confided so much as in her sister and other women-friends who’d rallied to her like dolphins in a treacherous sea rallying to one of their own stricken kind.

Zeno was sick with fury anew, at Kincaid. Who’d killed his daughter, and was now killing his wife.

It could not be a coincidence, Zeno thought. That his wife, Cressida’s mother, should be diagnosed with cancer approximately a year after Cressida’s disappearance.

(Zeno had reason to believe that others, close to Arlette, like her sister Katie Hewitt, thought so, too; but were too tactful to mention it to either of the Mayfields.)

The tiny lump “the size of a persimmon seed”—(so Arlette persisted in describing it in the vocabulary of a children’s storybook)—seemed to Zeno the way in which the destructive element that had snatched away his daughter had found, in his marriage, another way
in.

He’d wanted to take Arlette to Buffalo, to the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. He’d wanted her to be in the care of the very best breast cancer doctors upstate. But Arlette had demurred, wanting to remain close to home. She’d conferred with her women-friends, she’d made a decision to continue with local doctors—surgeon, interventional radiologist, oncologist. “Buffalo is more than two hundred miles away. It would just complicate things. Please, let me handle this in a way that isn’t distressful to me.”

“But you’re my wife! I want the very best for you.”

Only reluctantly had Arlette told Zeno her alarming news when he’d questioned her about a “surgical procedure” she was scheduled to have at the Carthage Hospital—Arlette’s euphemism for “biopsy.”

If she’d wept, if she’d broken down to weep in anyone’s arms, it had not been in her husband’s arms.

“Weren’t you going to tell me? When were you going to tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you, Zeno. You’ve been so—you have a tendency to be so—”

“To be so
concerned?
About my
family
?”

“Please don’t be angry with me, Zeno. You’re so often—”

“I’m not angry! I’m surprised, and I’m upset, and I’m disappointed, but—I am not angry.”

Seeing that it was all Arlette could do, to keep from stepping back from him.

He knew, in recent months he’d lost his old, Zeno-equanimity. He knew, he was frightening his wife away even as he meant to beckon her to him.

“I didn’t see any reason to worry you prematurely, Zeno. If the cyst turned out to be benign, as often they do . . .”

“Of course you should have told me! That’s ridiculous, and insulting.”

“I—I didn’t mean to be insulting . . .”

“You know how news spreads in Carthage. What would people say if they knew that Zeno Mayfield’s wife had had a biopsy at the hospital and he hadn’t even known?”

Zeno heard
Zeno Mayfield’s wife
.
My wife.

Zeno knew, this was not the right thing to say. Not to his wife who’d been so bravely trying to hide her anxiety from him; not to Arlette who loved him, and wanted to protect him. Yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself, his hurt was so deep.

“I want to take you to Buffalo, Arlette. We’ll make an appointment, we’ll drive there—tomorrow. I’ll call my doctor-friend Artie Bender, in Buffalo, he can get us an appointment with the very best breast-cancer specialist at Roswell.”

“Zeno, no! I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I have a surgeon, and an oncologist. I—I like them both very much. I trust them. I’ve been talking to people, women-friends, who recommend them, and who’ve gone to them. And Katie likes them, too. You know how critical Katie is . . .”

“Fuck Katie! Katie isn’t your husband, I am.”

Your husband. I am.

In his head these crude words echoed. Yet he could not stop himself, he must argue with the woman, try to impose his will upon her for
nothing but the very best for Zeno’s wife.

“You’re excluding me from your life, Arlette. In other ways, too—I hate it.”

“I—I don’t mean to.”

It was so, Arlette had begun attending church services more frequently. Community-service meetings, fund-raisers for local causes, evenings away from home when Zeno had only the vaguest idea where she was and what she was doing and with whom.

Arlette, where the hell were you? Why are you getting home so late?

Zeno, I told you. I explained, but you weren’t listening.

Then you should tell me again. I will listen.

It was so, Arlette had begun attending church more frequently, alone.

For Juliet had moved away. And Zeno never went to church.

(Though he’d have joined Arlette at the Congregationalist church if she’d asked him. He’d wanted her to think so.)

And it was so, Arlette was beginning to say things that disturbed Zeno, the supreme rationalist.

“Sometimes I feel, Zeno—something is trying to tell me something. I try to ‘read’ it—but can’t. As in a dream, you can’t read.”