Faultlines (9 page)

At the cottage, she lifted the bee skep carefully out of the backseat and carried it onto the porch, setting it on the old table she’d found a few weeks ago while out junking with Ruth. Stepping back, she admired it. She wondered if she could learn to keep bees. Beck would probably laugh at her. He certainly wouldn’t be able to tend them with her, though. He was allergic.

She was opening the front door, juggling her phone and purse, when some prescient sense of alarm tripped inside her brain. She didn’t know what caused her sudden unease, but then it came to her that she hadn’t had to unlock the door, the door she was certain she’d locked behind her this morning. After yesterday, the gutted pig, she was hypervigilant. Last night she’d checked and double-checked the windows and doors, making sure they were all locked up tight. She’d loaded her dad’s shotgun and propped it against the wall by the night table.

She stood right inside the door of the cottage now, listening intently. The stillness enveloped her, feeling eerie, and yet at the same time familiar. Dust sifted idly along feathery air currents. Setting her purse down, she went through the arched doorway into the kitchen. It was a moment before she saw it and another moment before she recognized what it was—that dazzling, iridescent puff of color on the floor.

Hummingbird,
said a voice in her mind, while another voice protested,
No
.

She bent over it, making herself take a closer look, but she knew. Knew it was one of the tiny black-chinned hummers that were prolific here, more prolific than the rubythroats she fed in Houston.

“Ooohh . . . ” The syllable, a half-despairing groan, escaped her. How had it gotten in? She glanced around at the windows. Locked. She checked the rest of the windows. All locked. Every one. With screens intact.

It wasn’t until she went back into the kitchen and crossed the floor to the kitchen-sink counter, intending to tear off a couple of sheets of paper towel to make a kind of shroud for the tiny fallen bird, that she saw the sheet of copy paper and on it the penciled scrawl—not one she recognized—that read:

I thought I told you to keep your doors locked.

7

R
ather than three dimensions—past, present, and future—time could more accurately and simply be described as having two: before and after. There was the sweet ordinariness of life before the crash, and there was the nightmare that began after. And in the course of that nightmare’s unfolding, there was the routine pause for breath before Jenna announced that Emmett wasn’t Jordy’s father, and there was the horrible, ringing shock of after.

Sandy would never forget it. Those moments when time slipped past in a vacuum without thought or movement. When even breath and heartbeats were suspended. When the very earth paused on its axis.

The silence lacked air; it lacked even a glimmer of comprehension. Everyone stared. Sandy’s stare felt stupid on her face. Looking at Emmett, she found him looking at her, bewilderment lancing his eyes, a half smile wavering on his mouth.

Jenna’s making a joke?
he seemed to be asking her.
Here? Now? In these circumstances?

“Jenna!” Sandy found her voice, and Jenna’s name shot from her mouth, a warning, a protest, a plea. “What are you doing?” she asked. Begged, actually, although, honestly, in some part of her brain, she knew it was too late. She thought of that old adage about closing the barn door after the horse gets out.

“Sandy?”

She looked up when Emmett prompted her, meeting his gaze and holding it even though it was hard. “Jordy is yours in every meaningful way a son can belong to his father.”

She said what she had believed nearly from the moment Emmett came back to her from Berkeley at the start of her senior year at the U of H, when he’d said leaving her had been the worst mistake of his life and begged her forgiveness. Her joy and relief were overwhelming. She might have fallen right there in the doorway of their apartment, if Emmett hadn’t caught her. If he hadn’t held on to her.

When they’d made love that day, he had adored her with his mouth, worshipped her with his hands; he had entered her as if she were a priceless treasure. And she had returned his reverence, running her palms along the familiar and sorely missed planes of his shoulders. She had numbered the bones connecting his spine, outlined the smooth, muscled contours of his buttocks. He was her home and she was his.

And it would have been perfect, except she was pregnant, the result of a recent and unfortunate handful of encounters, exactly three, with a man who had mentored her over the summer. Who had been gentle and kind, and suffering from his own grief. And although the affair was over by mutual consent, she knew she had to tell Emmett about it. But every time she tried, panic closed her throat. On the day she finally managed to say it, to say, “I’m pregnant,” Emmett misunderstood.

It was seven days after his return—ten days since she’d repeated the test three times that confirmed her nagging dread—and they were walking in Hermann Park. It was late in the afternoon. The light had gone silver, and an unseasonably chilly breeze skittered fallen leaves across their path. There was an urgency in the air; Sandy felt it pressing in on her. Soon it would be Christmas. They would be going home for the holidays. She would be showing by then. She had to tell.
Had to.
And so she did.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, and the words came out blunt and hard, as hard as the knowing of their power to destroy her in Emmett’s eyes.

She wasn’t prepared when he wheeled, his face alight, when he practically shouted, “We’re having a baby?” Without waiting for her answer, for the truth, he lifted her, spinning her around until they were dizzy.

His elation had been palpable, as agonizing to her as it was joyful to him. Her mind went blank. She couldn’t say what should have been said:
The baby isn’t yours.
She had only just gotten him back. She couldn’t risk losing him again. And when the very next day she came home from morning classes to find a giant stuffed Tigger sitting on their sofa, with a copy of the Pooh stories and a set of Winnie-the-Pooh baby dishes carefully balanced in Tigger’s stuffed lap, her heart stumbled. She thought the dishes were hers, from her childhood, until she read his note, saying he had found them at Macy’s.

I remember how much you loved Pooh and Tigger when we were kids. And you will never know how much I love you.
After that she thought telling him the truth would be cruel; it would be the same as ripping out his heart. That’s when she’d gone to see Jenna, because she had to tell someone.

By then Jenna was married to John, and they were living in San Antonio. John was on the police force there. Sandy had been in fear of how Jenna might react. She was morally conservative, and she could be judgmental, but upon Sandy’s arrival, she found that Jenna was bursting with the same news. She was pregnant, too, and in her ebullience—she and John had been trying for almost four years—it was almost as if she didn’t register Sandy’s troubled confession. They had hugged and laughed and cried, celebrating the prospect of raising their children together, and somehow Sandy’s lie became the truth, the way lies do when they’re repeated, and what everyone wants to hear anyway.

Once.
She had spoken of her brief affair with Jordy’s birth father only once, and only to Jenna. Sandy had put it out of her mind after that, deliberately and consistently, and Jenna’s reminder now felt foreign, as if it bore no connection to her or her history. It had never crossed Sandy’s mind that Jenna would betray her.

“Who is Jordy’s dad?” Emmett’s voice was hard, inflected with disbelief and offense.
How could she?
it seemed to ask.
How dare she?

“You left me.” Sandy’s need to defend herself overwhelmed her. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

“It’s a guy she worked with,” Jenna said.

“Does he know about Jordy?” Emmett asked.

“Yup.” Jenna sounded exultant, as if she were pleased with herself.

That tone—Sandy couldn’t stand it. She jumped up, flinging her arms. “Jenna! For God’s sake, shut up. What is the matter with you? Why are you doing this?”

Jenna went on as if she were oblivious, disconnected from the fallout her bombshell had created. “Would you rather Emmett got the news from the nurse who took his blood?” she asked. “You know they’d tell him, right?”

Sandy had no idea what was right. She appealed to Emmett. “He—Jordy’s birth father—I never saw him again after you came back. He understood that he was never to contact me, that he wasn’t responsible for the baby.”

Emmett looked on the verge of speaking, but Sandy would never know what he intended to say, because right then Dr. Showalter appeared, looking grim.

“Mrs. Simmons?”

Jenna stood. Very slowly, they all did.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, and in response to his apology, Sandy, her mom and dad, Emmett, and Troy as a group pressed close to Jenna as if they might shield her. A moment came then, one that in Sandy’s mind she could never characterize as before or after. It was an instant out of time, shot with love and the grief her family bore for the loss of one of their own: Travis, who had scarcely begun his life, a bird barely fledged, and now he was gone.

Later on that Saturday afternoon, a matter of hours after Travis slipped away, Sandy was parked alone on the shoulder of CR 440 at the spot where Jordy’s Range Rover had left the road. She hadn’t intended to come here. Home, where she’d been going, was in the opposite direction. She desperately wanted a hot shower, a change of clothes, a break from the hospital. It seemed somehow horrible of her to want any of these things when Jenna was at home now, so stunned at the loss of her son she couldn’t even cry, according to their dad.

Because of what had happened here, in this place. What it had taken from her.

Sandy stared out at the twisted barbed wire, shattered fence posts, the churned and broken ground. The funeral display of condolences was windblown now, like so much trash along the highway’s brush-choked verge. She had always hated the custom, marking an accident scene with gloomy memorabilia that after a matter of days resembled the aftermath of an ill-conceived and ghoulish revelry.

The sound of an approaching car brought her gaze around. She recognized the car, that it was a Lexus, but not the woman driving it. They were two strangers, and yet their gazes caught, and something universal passed between them, like commiseration, or perhaps it was pity, or Sandy’s imagination. Who knew? But Sandy envied the woman, whoever she was, driving away. She could be congratulating herself that it wasn’t her that was involved in this nightmare. No one had dropped a bomb on her family. But it was unkind, Sandy thought. She didn’t even know the woman.

Travis was buried the following Tuesday, the same day Jordy was arrested.

Sandy was at the hospital, alone in Jordy’s room—the other bed had remained unoccupied—waiting for him to be discharged when Huck and the other patrol sergeant, the one she’d met while Jordy was undergoing surgery, appeared.

Jordy was in the bathroom, changing into the suit she’d brought him to wear to the funeral, and she was standing at the window, looking out, when she heard them at the door.

She turned, and in the moment she registered the men in uniforms, she knew why they’d come, and her heart slammed into the wall of her chest. “No.” Her protest came unbidden.

“Jordy here?” Huck asked.

She shook her head. “You can’t do this now. Travis’s funeral is today in Wyatt. We have just enough time to get there.”

“I’m sorry, but as I told you on Sunday, I don’t have a choice. I’ve given you a couple of days. That’s all I can do.”

“Trav was like Jordy’s brother. They
were
brothers. You know that. You can’t do this to him, take away his chance to pay his last respects to his brother.”

“I understand—”

“I know you do, Huck. John was like your brother, wasn’t he? And when he was shot and killed, you were there. You felt the same as Jordy does, that it was your fault John was dead, right? Could anything, anyone—
should
anyone have tried keeping you from paying your last respects? It’s all Jordy has now, all he can do.” Sandy’s voice broke, and she took a moment, fighting for composure, steeling herself. “He blames himself, too, you know. He wishes he
had
been the one driving.”

“He was, Sandy.”

“My son isn’t a liar, and he says he wasn’t.” Sandy fought her doubt.

“The evidence says otherwise, as I’ve already explained.”

“No. You have it in for Jordy. You’ve got something against him. What is it? Why won’t you tell me?”

“Is that what he’s saying? How he wants to play it? That Madrone County law enforcement is out to get him? Because that’s not how we operate, I can tell you.”

“Jordy doesn’t want to
play
it any way,” she said. “Can we talk about how many times he’s been stopped and ticketed for practically nothing? Something is going on between you two. There has got to be a reason why he’s being targeted.”

Huck kept her gaze and his silence.

“C’mon.” Sandy almost stamped her foot, her frustration was that intense. “We’ve known each other for how long? You’ve sat at my table, Huck; you’ve spent time with Jordy. He looks up to you. He and Trav always did.”

The other cop shifted his weight, and she shot him a glance.
Ken Carter.
His name surfaced in her mind. He looked so uncomfortable.
Too bad,
she thought.
You don’t know the meaning of uncomfortable,
she thought.

“You break the law, there are consequences. He’s a hard case, Sandy. He won’t learn.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Why are you saying that? If that’s what you think of him, why haven’t I ever heard you say it before?”

“He drinks. You know that, right? That maybe he’s got a problem, and it’s not getting better?”

“But you’ve never ticketed him for that, have you? Minor in possession, isn’t that what it’s called? You’ve never called me, or Emmett, to say you thought Jordy was in trouble that way. Why is that, Huck?” She waited. “I thought we were friends.”

Nothing. His stare, patient, long-suffering. Obdurate.

She wasn’t getting anywhere, and she took a moment, and then very softly, she said, “Can’t you please give him a few more hours? Let him attend Travis’s funeral, then I’ll drive him to the jail myself. This afternoon. We’ll go through this ridiculous charade—” She broke off. Would she really drive Jordy there? She thought of the research she’d done.