Faultlines (12 page)

She brought up Len Huckabee’s harassment of Jordy again as she and Roger walked to the bail bondsman’s office, a block from the courthouse.

“When did it start? Can you remember?” Roger asked.

“The summer after his senior year is when Emmett and I talked to Huck about it, because Jordy had so many traffic tickets. He was working for me, but most of what I paid him went to the city of Wyatt.” Sandy glanced at Roger. “I think he and Travis both helped out when I did the install on your project.”

“They did. We drank a beer one day and talked football.”

Sandy winced inwardly at the mention of Jordy drinking a beer.
He and Trav were underage then,
she wanted to say. But she knew Jordy and Travis had taken beers from the other guys on her crew after they were done with work for the day. She’d never mentioned it to anyone, not even Jenna. She’d wanted to believe it was harmless. Growing-up boy stuff. “They were football cocaptains their senior year. Huck always went to the games if he could. He worked out with the guys.” Sandy paused. She had forgotten how much a part of their lives Huck had once been.

She said, “He hasn’t been around as much lately, but I figured that was because Jordy and Travis were away at UT.”

“Is the harassment still going on?”

“Five speeding tickets so far this summer. It’s crazy. A few weeks ago when Huck stopped Jordy, he searched the car.” Sandy hesitated, but then she said it. “He seems to think Jordy is a drinker, a party boy.”

“Has he arrested Jordy for that?”

“He’s never so much as mentioned it. You’d think he would have, as close to our family as he’s been. I don’t understand it.”

“Do you think Jordy is a drinker? In a way that causes you concern, I mean?”

“No. No,” she repeated. “But what if he tries to make the DA believe Jordy has a drinking problem?”

“He’d need proof. The prosecutor isn’t going to be influenced by hearsay.”

Sandy had her doubts, and she almost said so. Roger was from Florida. Maybe he didn’t know about the Texas good ol’ boy networking that went on, the deals that were made under the table. The media was full of such stories. As far as Sandy could tell, Texas was the living example of the old adage
You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours
.

“Huckabee is on thin ice anyway, conducting a search of Jordy’s car. Unless he was given permission, or he had some reason to suspect Jordy of committing a crime, he had no right to do it, not without a warrant.”

“That’s what Emmett and I thought. We told Jordy to call us if it happened again. He cooperated because he wants to believe Huck is his friend, and he’s got nothing to hide.”

Roger stopped outside a narrow storefront. A sign hanging under the awning was lettered with the name
F
AST
L
ANE
B
AIL
B
ONDS
, and in the window neon numbers announced they did business from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Inside, she filled out forms asking for basic information and handed over her debit card, and within an hour, after turning over the necessary paperwork at the courthouse annex, Sandy was able to take Jordy home.

He asked if they could go to the cemetery first, and she drove there, stopping on the way at the grocery store for a bouquet of flowers—a mix of carnations, alstroemeria, spider mums, and lilies in a range of hues. Jordy set them on Travis’s grave, where they were immediately lost among much grander arrangements. In addition to flowers, someone had left a football helmet with the number twenty-three on it, Travis’s number, and a miniature horse and rider dressed in green and yellow, the Wyatt High School Raider mascot. A banner lettered in glitter with Travis’s name and team and attached to a pole fluttered in the breeze, catching the last of the day’s light. Jordy touched the temporary sign that marked Travis’s grave, and the sound that broke from his chest was somewhere between a sob and a cough. Sandy laid her hand on his back. She willed herself not to cry, and she didn’t.

“I should have been here when he was buried,” Jordy said.

Sandy agreed; they both should have been, but what she said was, “You couldn’t help it.”

“Yeah, Mom, I could. I could have died instead of him.” He straightened.

“No, Jordy.” She grabbed his arm, and her thought was of how impossible the situation was. No matter what outcome she wished for, it was wrong, devastating, for someone else—unless the whole thing could have been prevented. Keeping his gaze, she said, “If only you guys hadn’t been drinking.” Oh, it was useless, useless and too late. She knew the moment she said it how pointless it was to take even one step down that road.

“You think I don’t know that?” Jordy jerked his arm free. “That I don’t see how fucking stupid—” But now, abruptly, he wheeled and took off, walking.

He wanted to run. Sandy could see the urgency in him. She read his frustration in the rigid line of his shoulders. It was only the pain of his injuries, his recent surgery, that kept his pace in check.

“Jordy!” Sandy set off after him.

When they reached her truck, she was almost surprised when he got in.

“I heard Grandma and Granddad talking. That’s how I knew about Travis.” He was staring through the windshield.

Sandy looked at him, brows raised, waiting. She hadn’t a clue of what was coming. She would think in the awful days ahead that maybe the way Jordy learned the rest of the truth was for the best; she might never have found the words to tell him.

“I heard them talking about Emmett, too,” Jordy said. “I know he’s not my real dad.”

8

J
ordy had come down with tonsillitis once when he was five and a half. He’d woken up in the night, making small noises of distress. She and Emmett had retired the baby monitor by then, but Sandy had heard him and had gone to him. His forehead and cheeks had been hot and dry. She’d given him baby aspirin and had wiped his face and arms with a cloth dipped in cool water. It seemed that hours had passed before the sun came up, before the pediatrician’s office opened. By then Jordy’s fever had risen, despite her ministrations, to 104.

Sandy had held him, limp and listless, on her lap, while Emmett had driven them, keeping his hand on Jordy’s small knee the whole way. Emmett had carried Jordy into the doctor’s office, and after the exam and diagnosis, he’d brought them home and had then gone back out to get the prescriptions filled.

Emmett’s caretaking of them had been nothing new. He was good like that. He’d changed his share of Jordy’s diapers and washed his clothes. When Jordy was little, Emmett had called him Choo Choo. Now he called him Ace or Chill, tough-guy names, out of affection. But Emmett could land hard on Jordy, too, when he got out of line. The saying in the family was that Jordy could drive God to drink, but Emmett almost never lost his temper. He’d wait until the heat was gone, then act. He was their guiding light, their steady ground.

Sandy wasn’t that good. She would yell and slam doors if her temper got the better of her.

She looked at him now. “Emmett? Really, Jordy? He’s still Dad,
your
dad.”

No answer. He was turned away from her so that all she could see was the back of his head, the stiff angle of his neck.

“Do you want to drive by Aunt Jenna’s on the way home?” Even as she asked, Sandy wondered whether Jenna would bar them from her house.

“I doubt she’d let us in,” Jordy said.

Sandy glanced his way again, pained to hear him echo her doubt. That Jenna would do this, close them out—but Sandy guessed Jenna was capable of anything now. She didn’t feel she’d been wrong to reveal the secret she’d sworn to Sandy she would keep. Their mother had told Sandy that, and she hadn’t disagreed. She hadn’t offered Sandy reassurance of love or support or forgiveness. No. Instead she’d made excuses for Jenna, that she couldn’t be held accountable. Basically Jenna was being given carte blanche to express her grief in whatever mean, vindictive way she chose. The sense of this was implicit in every exchange Sandy had with her parents. After all, Jordy was alive. What more could Sandy ask for, feel entitled to?

“Your aunt may not want us around right now,” Sandy said, “but there’s other family there. Even some of your friends could be there. It might help, seeing them. What do you think?”

No answer.

“I’m so sorry, honey. Finding out about your dad the way you did—it shouldn’t have happened. I should have been the one to tell you.” She stopped. Did her parents know he’d overheard them? But surely they would have told her. To believe anything else meant believing they were like Jenna, out to hurt her, out to make her pay.

She said, “I never wanted you or your dad to know, and maybe that was wrong, but Aunt Jenna was wrong, too, blurting it out the way she did. I was going to tell you—”

“When you had to, right? That’s great, Mom.”

“Do you remember the Christmas Dad got you the train, how thrilled you were?” she asked him.

Emmett had bought it the year Jordy turned four, after Sandy gave him
The Little Engine That Could
for his birthday that spring. By Christmas she’d lost count of the times they’d read it. Emmett came up with the idea that Santa’s gift that year should be a model train, and he’d set to work constructing a table to run it on out in the barn. The train was still there, and sometimes Sandy turned on the locomotive, watching it pull the cars along what now amounted to several dozen feet of track. Over the years, while Jordy was growing up, he and Emmett had embellished the landscape, making mountains and trees, creating farmlands, and constructing a tunnel and a river. They’d even built a small town very like Wyatt, where miniature people walked on Main Street.

But the single moment that Sandy most loved to remember was Jordy’s first sight of it on Christmas morning, the year he turned four. When Emmett had rolled the barn door open to reveal it, Jordy’s eyes had widened as recognition dawned, and then a look of utter joy had suffused his face so completely, she’d been reminded of the halos of angels. When he’d hurled himself at Emmett hard enough to make him stagger, it had brought Sandy to tears. Emmett had laughed, scooping Jordy into his arms.
Can we run it now, Dad?
Jordy spoke in her mind. She could still see him, that little boy, hopefully studying his dad’s face.

She asked him now if he could remember it, his happiness that day. “I’m only bringing it up because that’s how your daddy felt when I told him I was pregnant with you.” Sandy looked at Jordy, but he kept his face averted. “What if the train had been taken away?” she persisted. “How would you have felt?”

It was pathetic as an analogy—trains and babies weren’t exactly equal—but she’d never been good at words. She always thought of the best ones to say hours after the need for them had passed. “I couldn’t do that to your dad, couldn’t take his joy in his anticipation of having you for a son from him any more than I could have taken that train away from you.”

He looked at her. “Can we go home now?”

“Sure,” she said, and she started the truck’s engine, and shifting into reverse, backed out of the cemetery parking space.

The house was the same as when she and Emmett had left it five days ago. The weeds in the perennial garden that bordered the front porch were taller, and the wind had blown the cushions off the swing that hung in one corner, but other than that, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Sandy realized she’d almost expected the house to be damaged, too, in some horrific way, the way their lives had been.

Jordy reached for his canvas tote in the backseat.

“Let me,” she said. “You aren’t supposed to lift anything, remember?”

He was uncomfortable with it, letting her carry his stuff, but whether that was out of regard for her smaller stature or out of disgust with her, or confusion, or anger, she didn’t know.

Jordy’s bedroom and a guest room were at the end of a small hallway off the kitchen. The master bedroom and a small study were on the other side of the house, separated by what Sandy thought of as the heart of the house, the kitchen–dining–great room area. They had taken down walls in the circa 1920s farmhouse to make one central living space so they could be together, accessible to one another. It felt huge and vacant to her now. Without Emmett. Without her family.

The one she and Jordy, for different reasons, had been cast out of.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him.

He shook his head and said he was going to get some sleep. But he didn’t look at her. He didn’t wait to see if that was okay with her.

She said, “We should talk, Jordy.” But he was already gone. She lifted her voice. “We’re going to have to sometime.”

She heard his door close, and then nothing. The pull of her breath. The plodding gait of her heart. Getting her cell phone from her purse, she dialed Emmett, and when her call rolled to his voice mail, she said, “Dammit, Emmett, where are you? Please call me. Please,” she repeated. Clicking off, she dialed his mother’s landline, but there was no answer there, either, and she hung up without leaving a message.

She spoke to her parents at Jenna’s. They didn’t have to say Jenna needed them more.

“She hasn’t had much more than a bite or two of food in days,” her mother said.

“Make her a breakfast shake,” Sandy said, “with strawberries and watermelon. It’s her favorite. Make sure the melon is really sweet, okay? And add some yogurt. You know what a health nut she is.”

Her mother said she’d try it. She asked how Jordy was. “You were able to bring him home, thank God. Judge Becker said he’d been released.”

“Yes, but how does Dad know the judge?”

“Do you remember several years ago the girl who was driving drunk and crashed her mother’s SUV here in town? It was in the news. Her boyfriend was with her. He was pretty seriously injured.”

“That was Judge Becker’s daughter? She went to jail, didn’t she?”

“A juvenile facility, I think. Anyway, when she got out on probation, your dad hired her. He wrote several letters of recommendation when she applied to law school at UT in Austin, and she was accepted. Trust me, Sam Becker was glad to return the favor.”

The good ol’ boy system,
Sandy thought. Love it or hate it, it had come through for Jordy. Maybe he had an ally in Judge Becker. Maybe the judge was a better-connected good ol’ boy than Len Huckabee.

“You found an attorney.”

“Roger Yellott,” Sandy answered, although she felt as though her mom had already heard it from the judge.

“He’s the client you had so much trouble with a while back, isn’t he? I didn’t know he was an attorney.”

Of course her mother knew all about Roger. Sandy had always told her pretty much everything. With one exception. “I’m sorry,” she said. She kept saying it as if those two words would undo the damage.

“You did what you felt was best at the time.” It was the response her mother had given Sandy the first time they’d spoken after Jenna had so helpfully revealed the truth about Jordy’s birth father, and the same one she’d given the handful of times she and her mom had discussed it since.

Sandy didn’t know if they meant the things they said. She honestly wasn’t sure she was sorry for having kept her parents in the dark. Look at them now—were they better off for having learned the truth? Were
any
of them? “Jordy knows. He told me on the way home just now that he overheard you and Dad talking.”

“About Emmett? That he isn’t—oh no. Oh dear, we never meant—is he all right? What did he say? It must have been such a shock.”

“He didn’t say anything, really.” Sandy was almost grateful for her mother’s distress. Until now, hearing it, she had been so afraid that, like Jenna, her parents hated her, too, for her lie, for Jordy having ever been born, only to grow up to become the means of Travis’s needless and horrible death.

“Well, maybe, like Emmett, he needs some time to wrap his mind around it.”

“Maybe.” Sandy trailed a fingertip along the countertop. There were worse things, scarier things, confronting them, she thought.
Do you know how much the helicopter cost?
Sandy had asked Emmett that yesterday when they’d talked. But the helicopter was only the leading edge of the financial landslide coming down on them. Because they’d been forced to go out of network, insurance was almost no help. She’d told Emmett they’d have to sell the mutual funds.
What funds?
he’d asked. She’d forgotten—conveniently, Emmett said—that they’d sold the funds when the oil industry took a nosedive and business fell off. Now, on top of that, there were going to be astronomical legal fees. Emmett might have a stroke when he heard. Or maybe he would be the one to flee the country. Or maybe he would eschew obligation entirely by saying Jordy wasn’t his son.

“How is Irene doing?” her mother asked.

“Better,” Sandy said. “She’s going home today or tomorrow, I think.” The doctors had replaced a valve in her heart the day after Emmett’s arrival. He had yet to tell her about the accident. He said her health was too precarious. Sandy had stopped asking when he was coming home.

“Jordy’s birth father—” her mother began.

“I don’t want to talk about him right now, Mom.” Sandy sat at the table in the breakfast nook, and as if it had been waiting for an opportunity, she felt swamped by a wave of weariness. It pulled at her limbs, weighted her breath. Her mother said Jordy might very well want to know the man’s identity, and it was as if her voice were coming at Sandy from over a hill.

“You won’t be able to put him off, I don’t imagine.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Sandy said, although she had no idea how.

“Honey? Do you think he might have a problem with alcohol? I don’t want to pry, to interfere, but is it possible he’s depressed or—”

“Has anyone in our family been a drinker? I mean to excess—like they were addicted?”

“No, not that I know of. But I don’t think it’s always genetic, is it, when someone abuses alcohol or drugs?”

Sandy didn’t answer.

“A doctor could tell you. Maybe that would be a good place to start.”

Did her mother mean a psychiatrist?

The silence grew heavy with her mother’s consideration, the debate she was having with herself on what more to say, how far to push. Sandy imagined hanging up.

Her mother veered in a different direction. “Jenna didn’t mean it,” she said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

“It’s all right,” Sandy said, even though it wasn’t. She knew how it troubled her mother when she and Jenna fought. But this was no childish squabble between siblings. It fell far outside that realm.

“She needs time. Huck was saying when he was here earlier that he—”

“Huck?” Sandy straightened. “What was he doing there?”
Poisoning everyone’s mind?
The question burned through Sandy’s brain.