Faultlines (14 page)

Who knew? Her thoughts weren’t coherent, really. She couldn’t rely on them.

“There might be other witnesses,” she said now to Emmett, because clearly the fool that lived in her head was determined to cling to hope. “Other drivers might have seen something different. Roger’s not finished . . . ”

Her pause invited Emmett’s answer, but he didn’t supply one. Maybe he was like her when she’d been told the witness had positively ID’d Jordy. Maybe it had knocked the wind out of him, too.

“It looks bad for him, Emmett. Roger says if Jordy’s found guilty, he could be sent to prison for as many as thirty years. Thirty years.” She repeated it softly, more to herself. Jordy would be fifty when he got out. She and Emmett would be dead, or close. She was fighting tears when she told Emmett she couldn’t handle it, that she needed him, wouldn’t he please come home.

She was working so hard on not crying that when he answered, she only caught the gist of his response. It was something like
I don’t know what to tell you
or
I don’t know what you want from me
. Whatever it was, she felt he was blaming her or punishing her, and it made her furious.

“I can understand that you’re angry at me,” she told him, “but you’re the only dad Jordy has ever known, and he needs you. I don’t care what either of you thinks of me. You have meant the world—been the world—to each other, and you need to come home. For him, Emmett.”

Silence. The sense of his breath heavy with the weight of her betrayal of his trust in her.

She tried again. “He’s not to blame, Emmett. Can’t you see that? Please come home for him. Please,” she repeated, and she gently recradled the phone.

It was after midnight when she entered his name, Jordy’s birth father’s name, into a search engine. She hadn’t kept a record of his contact information when he’d written to her before. She’d wanted nothing to do with him other than to continue pretending he didn’t exist. She could never have foreseen the circumstances that would change her mind.

She was surprised by the number of entries that appeared on the page, the most recent involving media coverage of a balcony collapse in Houston that had killed nine people. Reading through the information, she learned that only days ago the architects had been severed from legal liability. Digging further, she came across the website for his firm, and that was where she found his e-mail address. She clicked the link, and when it opened a message window, she cupped her elbows, staring at it. It was a while before she could make herself put her fingertips on the keys, but then she did.

Dear Beck, I don’t know if you remember, but two years ago you e-mailed, saying you and your wife were thinking of moving to the area and asking if I would consider letting you both meet my son—

She stopped, looked at the words
my son
, typed
Jordan
, and stopped again.

I didn’t answer, which was probably wrong of me, but I was scared—

No, she thought, and erased all she’d written. There were more false starts. An hour passed, but finally she had composed a letter that she hoped would accomplish what she intended, which was, in part, to warn Beck of Jordy’s intention to contact him, and to ask him to be gentle, to be kind. It was what she remembered most clearly about Beck Hennessey—his kindness.

It was a week before she found a response in her in-box.

We are sorry to inform you, but Mr. Hennessey has passed away.

9

B
eck had been dead four weeks and three days when the young man appeared at the cottage. It was early, not yet eight o’clock, and Libby, taking advantage of the still-cool morning air, was on her knees near the rose arbor, wielding a shovel. She looked up and was startled to catch sight of someone rounding the corner of the house. With the sun in her eyes, he wasn’t more than a dark shape, tall and wide shouldered. Big. Much bigger than she was. Given all that had happened in recent weeks, she was wary and rose from her knees, slowly, keeping the shovel, a sharpshooter with a honed blade, in her grasp.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

He stopped several feet from her and said he wasn’t sure. He seemed as leery of her as she was of him.

“Who are you looking for?”

He made a sound, like a laugh but not. “I’m Jordan Cline,” he said, and Libby’s breath dipped.

The reality of him—Beck’s son—in the flesh, standing only feet away from her, was much different from the abstract idea. It shook her more than she’d thought it would when she’d imagined the encounter. She’d known about him since before he was born. She’d been wrecked emotionally when Beck told her of this boy’s existence. The memory of her pain was what had led Beck to say, before leaving for Houston, that simply because they were in the same vicinity as the son he’d never met, it didn’t mean they had to pursue making contact. Now, she felt only sadness that Beck wasn’t here. It didn’t seem fair.

“Do you know who I am?” the young man asked.

“I do,” Libby answered. She might have been less certain if not for Sandy’s e-mail. Beck’s assistant, Julie, had forwarded it during the week following his death with the comment that she’d advised Mrs. Cline that Mr. Hennessey had passed. Ever since Libby had wondered what Julie had made of it, if even now Beck was the talk of the office, of Houston, that for all its big-city swagger had a gossipy good ol’ boy network that would rival the one in Wyatt any day. She had no way of knowing what was being said, having left Houston just days after Beck’s funeral.

“I didn’t plan to come,” he said. “I mean, I did—”

“How did you find me?”

“I looked online. That’s how I found out y’all had bought land, part of the Little B. I live on 1620, too,” he added. “But I’m about fifteen miles out from the other side of town.”

“Ah.” Libby had thought maybe his mother had told him.

“I told my mom, but she already knew you were here.”

“Yes,” Libby said. Ruth had heard Sandy was asking questions around town about the Hennesseys. Sandy had even approached Ruth at the grocery store to ask if she was Libby’s real estate agent. Ruth had thought it was nervy, but not near as nervy as Sandy’s e-mail to Beck.

A cloud slipped over the sun; he took off his ball cap, and she saw it. His resemblance to Beck—the dark, curling hair and startling blue eyes, the strong jaw and chin with Beck’s same cleft—all this young man’s features, even his stance, the shape of his knees, the swell of his calves, was so strikingly reminiscent of her memory of her husband as the young man who had come upon her at the hospital on the day of Helen’s death, that tears rose, a fist, seizing her throat. Here was the son she had prayed to give birth to, the boy she had nearly lost her mind over, trying to conceive. Grown up now, healthy and fit—the very image of his father. Beck’s incarnation, or, at least, that’s how she wanted to see him.

The sense of this thrilled and yet unnerved her. An urge came to drop the shovel and run. She stood her ground, keeping his gaze. He looked worn-out, somehow haunted. Older than the grainy images she’d seen of him in the newspaper, as if all that he was undergoing now—the criminal charges, the revelation about his birth—was aging him.

“You look like him,” she said, and she could tell he wasn’t sure how to take it.

“It’s true, then.” He wasn’t asking, really. He seemed resigned.

“You didn’t know.”

“I overheard my grandparents talking when I was in the hospital.”

“That’s how you found out?”

“Yeah. They didn’t know it, either. No one did except my aunt, and she kind of blurted it out when Emmett said he was going to donate blood in case I needed it. They would have figured out it wasn’t a match, I guess.”

Libby was appalled. She thought she wouldn’t have kept such a secret in Sandy’s place. But who knew? It was easy enough to predict what you would or wouldn’t do from the sidelines. “I heard about your accident,” she said. “I’m so sorry about—everything.”

“Thanks.” He bent quickly, and scooping a pebble out of the dirt, he pitched it, hard, into the woods.

Libby had the sense he wasn’t dealing with his grief so much as he was fighting it, trying to hold himself together.

“Mom told me she wrote to your husband. That was before she—we knew he died.”

“Yes.” Libby passed the shovel to her other hand, feeling his eyes on her. She felt the pressure of his every unasked question taking shape in the lingering pause. Did Libby know about the e-mail? Had she read it? Was it a shock to her, finding out about him, or had she, like his aunt and his mother, known of his existence all along? But why should she feel compelled to explain, to become part of his dilemma? She didn’t want it, not the aggravation or the worry.
Ask your mother,
she wanted to say. Let her tell you her sex with my husband was a mistake, and the resulting pregnancy was an accident.
You
were an accident, one your mother kept for herself and lied about, the one your birth father was sworn never to contact.

It was only now when all hell was breaking loose—and wasn’t it, oh, Libby didn’t know, convenient, ironic, something—that Sandy had changed her mind and relented. When Beck was no longer here to handle the situation, to assume any of the responsibility.
I have nowhere else to turn,
Sandy had written in her note to Beck.
Between the out-of-network medical fees and all the legal expenses, an attorney retainer, the cost of going to trial . . . you will surely agree that to use Jordy’s college fund isn’t . . . would never have approached you if the circumstances weren’t . . . I know this is out of the blue . . . 

Out of the blue?
Try outside the known universe,
Libby had thought a month ago reading Sandy’s message to Beck.
Try outside the realm of sanity. Try two years ago you couldn’t be bothered to reply to my husband’s very reasonable request to establish a connection. And now you want his involvement, his money and support?
The day she’d received the forwarded e-mail, her anger at Sandy’s effrontery had driven her from the cottage. She’d walked for miles and come back red-faced and sweating from the heat, and her fury had persisted. She’d consoled herself with the thought that, given the fact of Beck’s death, Sandy wouldn’t contact him again.

And she hadn’t. She’d sent her son instead.

“My mom doesn’t know I’m here. She wouldn’t like it.”

Libby met Jordan’s glance, not sure if she believed him. Desperation could drive a person to insane lengths.

“She says you have enough stress, you know, because of losing your husband.”

“You came on your own? Why? I don’t mean to sound—Beck is dead now.”

He shrugged, looking away, seeming bewildered, almost stunned.

She remembered once in her days as a guidance counselor, working with a group of kids who’d lost whole chunks of their existence—homes, pets, loved ones—in a hurricane-spawned tornado. They’d had this same look, as if they were lost and searching for a landmark, solid ground, anywhere they might feel safe again. Jordan hadn’t lost his home, but he had lost his identity—or half of it, anyway. He had lost his known and familiar world. He’d been lied to and betrayed. And all of that in addition to grappling with the enormous consequences of his own actions.

Her heart twisted with concern for him, for the outcome, the impact this was bound to have on his life. And as much as she did not want him here, as much as she did not want to deal with him or his mother, she couldn’t get enough of looking at him, this boy, young man, Beck’s son, who could have been—should have been—her son. She touched her temple. Thoughts like that—she would have to watch herself.

“Are you planting those?” He nodded at the collection of shrubbery in nursery pots behind her.

“Trying,” she answered. “It’s not easy digging here. There’s so much rock.”

“You have a rock bar? A posthole digger? I could help.”

She wanted to say no, but the truth was she didn’t want him to go. “I have both,” she said. “They’re so heavy, I can’t use them.”

He had experience, he said. “I’ve worked for my mom summers since—” He stopped to think. “Junior high? Maybe before. Me and Travis—” He stopped again, looking away, but his pain and grief, like her own, were still raw and too fresh to hide.

She noticed now, where the sun picked at it, the fleshy, reddened scar that carved a cruel path from the corner of his right eye to his ear. There was a fair-size divot where the flesh had been gouged out, near the hairline above his temple. Libby had to quell the urge to touch his arm, to do something to show she did care.

He said, “My mom’s a landscape architect.”

“I know,” Libby said. She wasn’t sure exactly when she realized that the woman in the vintage pickup with the landscaping sign she’d seen parked alongside CR 440 back in July had to have been Sandy. Much of the time surrounding Beck’s death was a blur. Jordan followed her to the shed, and they found the tools. “You’re at UT, right? Are you thinking of going into the same line of work as your mom?”

“I don’t know if I’m going back to school. Who knows where I’ll be. Where do you want me to dig?”

She was disconcerted for a moment, her mind hanging on what Jordan had said. Did he think he would be in jail? But his trial was months away, scheduled for spring, she thought. She could have asked. Beck would have if he were here, but as Jordan’s father he’d have a right to such information. Wouldn’t he? Even if he hadn’t raised him?

“Ma’am?” he said, prompting her.

“Yes,” she said. “Where is a good question.” She cast a glance around, explaining her plan was to renovate and restore the old garden that had once surrounded the cottage. Together, they lugged the pots, arranging and spacing the shrubs, a mix of mountain laurel, rough-leaf dogwood, and American beautyberry she’d bought locally and hauled to the cottage the day before in Beck’s truck. She’d been thrilled to find such a great selection at a nearby native nursery.
Wait until Beck saw . . . 
The thought had risen, a moment’s elation, gone as suddenly as it came in the cold swoop of reality.

“You have to let me pay you,” she said at one point. She was on her knees, settling dirt around the root ball of one of the mountain laurels.

He rammed the thick iron bar into the rocky earth hard enough that she felt the ground shudder. “To tell you the truth, it feels good, working like this.”

“Yes.” She went back to her task. Augie and Ruth had told her how close Jordan and his cousin had been. As close as brothers. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like, what kind of hell it was, to be accused of killing your brother.

“We were going to build a house here,” she said during a water break later. It was after twelve now, and although they were in the shade, working on the north side of the cottage, it was getting hotter, and she was worn-out and hungry, ready to stop. She asked if he’d like a sandwich. He demurred, not wanting to be any trouble, but when she said she would like having the company, that meals alone were kind of a drag, he followed her into the cottage.

He’s a stranger,
a voice warned,
a strange man
.
Kid,
corrected another voice. But who knew why he’d come, what he was after? For all she knew, he could be as twisted as the kid who’d strung up the slaughtered hog in the cedar tree, left a dead hummingbird on her kitchen floor, a threatening note on her countertop, or who’d most recently left a nest filled with butchered baby rats in her mailbox on the highway. She’d found that last week. She didn’t know what to make of it. If Beck, as a consulting architect on the condo project where the balcony had collapsed, was the target, what was the point of threatening him now that he was dead?

She and Jordan moved around the small kitchen, taking awkward turns at the sink, washing their hands and drying them. She invited him to sit down at the table and felt better when he did.

“I have almost anything you’d like.” Libby opened the refrigerator, contemplating the contents with dismay. She rattled off a list: there were casseroles—turkey, ham, or tuna—several pasta salads, a fruit salad, two cakes, and four kinds of pie. “I could open a restaurant. People from town have been so kind.”
Kind or nosy,
she thought. News of Beck’s death had spread like a virus in town. Ruth had said folks in Wyatt liked nothing better than to join a disaster brigade.

Their hearts are good,
Ruth had said.

Yes, but not their pity,
Libby replied.

She turned to Jordan. “Really. What would you like?”

“Whatever you’re having is fine,” he said.

She took out a plastic bowl filled with fresh spinach and the egg salad she’d made the day before when, perversely, her stomach had wanted something she’d made herself. She got a loaf of wheat bread from a cabinet.

He broke the silence. “You’re building a house, you said.”

“We were. Beck and I were until he died.” She pushed the sentence out, stripping the emotion from it. Sometimes it was possible. Sometimes she could think of his loss, speak of it, and it did not take her breath, did not leave her wishing—oh, not so much for her own death, as for a way to be free of the constant, jarring reality of his. There was nothing she could do to fill the vacancy he’d left behind. She’d told Ruth if it ended up breaking her, oh well. Ruth thought Libby meant she would harm herself. Libby didn’t know what she meant. So far, she and the grief were wary adversaries, walking around each other, taking each other’s measure. So far, she still got up every morning and made the coffee and greeted the sun and proceeded with her plan to renovate the old perennial borders that framed the cottage. She talked to Beck in her mind and out loud. She thought sometimes he answered her.