CHAPTER 19
1
Clint found Hicks’s cell phone number in the address book in his desk and called it from the landline. The acting warden was disconcertingly relaxed. Maybe he’d popped a Valium or two.
“A lot of the women seem to have reached a state of, I guess you’d call it acceptance, Doc.”
“Acceptance isn’t the same as giving up,” said Clint.
“Put it how you want to put it, but the lights have gone out on more than half of them since you left.” Hicks said this with satisfaction, noting that the officer-to-inmate ratio was once again manageable. They would still be in good shape once they lost the female officers.
This was how people in power thought of human life, wasn’t it? In terms of sum benefits and ratios and manageability. Clint had never wanted to be in power. As a ward of the foster system he had, mostly by grace, survived the dominion of countless domestic tyrants; he had chosen his field in clear reaction to that experience, in order to help the helpless, people like the boy he’d been, like Marcus and Jason and Shannon—and like his own mother, that pale, worried ghost of his faintest memory.
Jared squeezed his father’s shoulder. He had been listening.
“Be advised, the paperwork is going to be unprecedented,” Hicks continued. “The state does look down on shooting prison inmates.” Ree Dempster was cooling in the janitor’s closet and Hicks was already thinking of the paperwork. Clint decided he had to get off the phone before he used the slang term that referred to men who had sexual congress with the woman who’d given them birth.
Clint said he’d be in soon, and that was it. Jared offered to make fried baloney sandwiches. “You must be hungry.”
“Thank you,” said Clint. “Sounds like just the right thing.”
The meat sizzled and popped in the pan and his nose found the smell. It was so good tears came to his eyes. Or maybe the tears were in his eyes already.
“I need to get me one of those.” That was what Shannon had said to him that last time, looking at the picture of little Jared. And apparently she had.
Sheila, Lila had said the girl’s name was, Sheila Norcross.
It was flattering, really, maybe the most flattering thing that had ever happened to him, Shannon giving her girl his last name. It was a problem now, but still. It meant that she’d loved him. Well, he had loved Shannon, too. In a way. There were things between them that other people could never understand.
He remembered that New Year’s Eve. With that damp in her eyes, Shan had asked him if it was all right. The music had been blaring. Everything had smelled like beer and cigarettes. He had bent down to her ear to make sure he heard her . . .
A bite or two was all that Clint could manage. As fine as the smell was, his stomach was a hard rubber ball. He apologized to his son. “It’s not the food.”
“Yeah,” said Jared. “My appetite’s not great, either.” He was picking at the sandwich he’d made himself.
The glass door slid open with a whoosh, and Lila entered, holding a white bundle.
2
Once he’d killed his mother, Don Peters struggled to proceed.
The first step was apparent: clean up. That was going to be hard to do, however, because Don had opted to murder his mother by pressing the barrel of a Remington shotgun against her web-encrusted forehead and then pulling the trigger. This had done the job with aplomb (or maybe he meant some other word), but it had created a hell of a mess, and Don was better at making messes than cleaning them up. This was a point his mother had made often.
And what a mess it was! Blood, brains, and bits of web sprayed up the wall in the shape of a huge, ragged megaphone.
Instead of doing something about the mess, Don sat in his La-Z-Boy and wondered why he had made it in the first place. Was it his mother’s fault that Jeanette Sorley had waved her perky little tail in his face and then tattled when he would only let her jerk him off? Was it? Or that Janice Coates had hounded him out of his job? Or that Norcross, the head-shrinking priss, had sucker-punched him? No, his mother had nothing to do with any of that, and yet Don had driven home, seen that she was asleep, fetched his shotgun from the pickup, returned inside, and blown her dreaming brains out. Always supposing she was dreaming—who knew?
Yes, he had been rattled. Yes, he had been mistreated. Still, loath as Don was to concede it, as bad as it was to be rattled and mistreated, you shouldn’t up and kill your mother. That was overreacting.
Don drank a beer and cried. He didn’t want to kill himself or go to jail.
Seated on his mother’s couch, calmer with the beer in his stomach, it occurred to Don Peters that cleaning up might not present such a problem after all. The authorities were extremely busy. Things you could not normally get away with—like arson—you could probably skate on, thanks to Aurora. Forensic analysis of crime scenes was suddenly looking like a rather secondary field. Besides, it was chicks that did all that microscope-and-computer shit. On TV, at least.
He stacked a bundle of newspaper on the stovetop and flipped on the burner. While the paper got started, he squeezed a bottle of barbecue lighter fluid, scribbling the liquid over the drapes and the furniture, all the stuff that would go up fast.
As he was driving away from the burning house, Don realized that there was something else he needed to do. This part was a lot more difficult than starting a fire, but no less important: for once in his life, Don needed to cut himself some serious slack.
If it was true that Don’s relationships with women had occasionally been fraught, it also had to be acknowledged that his relationship with his mother—his earliest relationship—must have been the thing that set him off on the wrong foot. Even Norcross would probably agree to that much. She had raised him on her own and he thought she did her best, but what had his mother ever done to prepare him for the likes of Jeanette Sorley, Angel Fitzroy, or Janice Coates? Don’s mother had made him grilled cheese sandwiches and baked him individual strawberry pies shaped like UFOs. She had brought him ginger ale and looked after him when he had the flu. When Don was ten, she had constructed for him a black knight costume out of cardboard and strips of felt that was the envy of the entire fourth grade—the entire school!
That was all lovely, but maybe his mother had been too kind. Hadn’t his own go-along, get-along nature gotten him in trouble more than once? For instance, when Sorley came on to him. He had known it was wrong, and yet, he had let her take advantage of him. He was weak. All men were, when it came to women. And some—many, even—were . . . were . . .
Too generous!
Yes!
Generosity was a ticking bomb handed down to him by his mother and it had exploded in her face. There was a justice to that (an incredibly cruel justice, granted), and although Don could accept it, he vowed that he would never like it. Death was a harsh punishment for generosity. The real criminals were the Janice Coates types. Death wouldn’t be too harsh for Janice Coates. Instead of dosing her with the pills, he wished he’d had the chance to choke her out. Or cut her throat and watch her bleed out.
“I love you, Mom,” he said to the cab of his pickup truck. It was as if he were testing the words to see if they’d ricochet. Don repeated the statement a couple of more times. He added, “I forgive you, Mom.”
Don Peters found that he didn’t want to be alone with his voice. It was like—like it didn’t sound right.
(“Are you sure that’s true, Donnie?” his mother used to ask when he was little and she thought he might be lying. “Is it the God’s-honest that you only took one cookie from the jar, sweetheart?”
(“Yes,” he’d say, “It’s the God’s-honest,” but it wasn’t, and he supposed she had known it wasn’t, but she let it slide and look what it had gotten her. How did the Bible put it? Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.)
3
Because the lot at the Squeaky Wheel was packed, Don ended up parking at a curb down the street.
On his way inside, he passed a few men standing on the sidewalk with their beer glasses, admiring the large blaze in the hills. “And there’s another one—think that’s someplace in town,” one of the men noted.
Probably Mom’s house, Don thought. Maybe it’ll take the whole neighborhood, and who knows how many sleeping women. A few of them good, which was a shame, but the great majority either sluts or frigid. Always too hot or too cold, that was women for you.
He acquired a shot and a beer at the bar, and found a seat at the end of a long table with Deputy Terry Coombs and a black guy whose face he recognized from previous evenings at the Squeak but whose name he couldn’t recall. Don gave a moment’s consideration to the question of whether Terry might have heard about the doings at the prison, the false accusation and frame-up and so on. But if Coombs had heard, he was in no condition or mood to do anything about it—the deputy looked half asleep with a three-quarters-empty pitcher on the table in front of him.
“You boys mind if I join you?” Don had to yell to be heard over the commotion in the bar.
The other two shook their heads.
Big enough to handle a hundred, the barroom, at three in the morning, was handling at least that many. Although there were a few women, most of the crowd was male. Under the current circumstances, it seemed that not many women were looking to imbibe depressants. Incongruously, there were also a few teenagers lurking around, dazed expressions on their flushed faces. Don felt sorry for them, but the mama’s boys of the world were going to have to grow up fast now.
“Hell of a day,” Don said. He felt better now that he was with men.
The black guy murmured an agreement. He was tall, lots of shoulder, forty or so. Sitting ramrod straight.
“I’m just trying to decide whether or not to kill myself,” Terry said.
Don chuckled. Coombs had a hell of a deadpan. “Did you see the Secret Service putting their boots in the asses of those rioters outside the White House? Must have been like Christmas for those guys. And Jesus, look at that.”
Terry and the black guy turned their gazes to one of the televisions on the wall.
It was security footage from an underground garage. A woman, age and race rendered indeterminate by the placement of the camera and the grain of the footage, though clearly dressed in the uniform of a parking garage attendant, was atop a man in a business suit. She appeared to be stabbing him in the face with something. Black liquid pooled on the pavement, and bright white strands hung from her face. The TV news never would have shown something like that before today, but it seemed that Aurora had put Standards and Practices—that was what they called it, right?—out of business.
“Must’ve woke her up for his keys or something, huh?” Don mused. “This stuff, it’s, like, the ultimate P-M-S, am I right?”
The two men made no response.
The television feed cut to the anchor’s desk. It was empty; George Alderson, the old dude that Don had watched earlier, had disappeared. A younger guy, wearing a sweatshirt and headphones, poked his head into the frame and made a sharp get-out-of-here! gesture. The feed flipped to an advertisement for a sitcom.
“That was unprofessional,” said Don.
Terry drank directly from his pitcher of beer. Foam ran down his chin.
4
Sleeper storage.
This wasn’t Lila’s only consideration this early Friday morning, but it was right up there. The ideal spot would be a basement, or a tunnel with a concealed entrance. A tapped-out mineshaft could serve well—their area certainly had a healthy supply of those—but there was no time to find one, no time to set it up. So, what did that leave? It left people’s homes. But if groups of vigilantes—of crazies, whoever—did start to go around killing the sleeping women, homes were the first place they’d check. Where’s your wife? Where’s your daughter? It’s for your own safety, for everyone’s safety. You wouldn’t leave dynamite lying around your house, would you?
What if there were houses that no one lived in, though, houses that had never had a single occupant? There were plenty of houses like that just up the street: the other half of the development on Tremaine Street, the ones that had gone unsold. It was the best option that Lila could think of.
Once she had explained it to her son and her husband, Lila was drained. She felt ill and scraped, like a flu was coming on her. Hadn’t a stoner she’d arrested once for breaking and entering warned her about this, about the pain of drugs wearing off? “Anything, any risk to avoid the come-down,” he’d said. “The come-down is ruination. Death to your happy.”
Clint and Jared didn’t say anything immediately. The three of them were standing in the living room.
“Is that—a baby?” Jared finally asked.
She handed the cocoon to him. “Yes. Roger Elway’s daughter.”
Her son pulled the baby close. “This could probably get worse,” he said, “but I don’t know how.”
Lila reached up and traced the hair at Jared’s temple. The difference between the way Terry had held the baby—like it might explode or shatter—and the way Jared held it made her heart pick up speed. Her son hadn’t given up. He was still trying to be human.
Clint shut the sliding glass door, closing off the smell of smoke. “I want to say you’re being paranoid about hiding sleepers—or storing them, to use your word—but you might be onto something. We could bring Molly and the baby and Mrs. Ransom and whoever else we find over to one of the empties.”
“There’s the demo house at the top of the hill,” Jared said. “It’s actually furnished.” And, in response to his mother’s reflexive glance: “Chill. I didn’t go in, just looked through the living room window.”
Clint said, “I hope it’s an unnecessary precaution, but better safe than sorry.”
She nodded. “I think so. Because you’re going to have put me in one of those houses eventually, too. You know that, don’t you?” Lila didn’t say it to shock him or to hurt him. It was just a fact that had to be stated, and she was too tired to gild the lily.
5
The man seated on the toilet in the women’s bathroom stall at the Squeaky Wheel was a wall-eyed character in a rock tee-shirt and dress trousers. He gawked at Michaela. Well, look on the bright side. At least his pants were up.
“Dude,” she said, “this is the ladies’. Another few days and it’ll be all yours for eternity. For now, though, out.” Widespread Panic, his tee-shirt read—of course.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I only need a second.” He gestured at a little clutch in his lap. “I was about to smoke some rocks, but it was too crowded in the men’s room.” He grimaced. “And the men’s room smells like shit. Big shit. That’s unpleasant. Please, if you can be a little patient, I’d appreciate it.” His voice dropped. “I saw some magic earlier tonight. Not Disney magic. Bad magic. I’m pretty steady as a rule, but it kind of freaked me out.”
Michaela took her hand from her purse where she had been holding Ursula’s pistol. “Bad magic, huh? That does sound unsettling. I just drove all the way from DC to find out that my mother’s already asleep. What’s your name?”
“Garth. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” she said. “My mother was a pain in the ass, but there was a lot to like about her. Can I have some of your crack?”
“It’s not crack. It’s meth.” Garth unfastened his clutch and took out a pipe and handed it to her. “But you can certainly have some if you’d like.” Next, he fished out a Ziploc of rocks. “You look just like the girl from the news, you know.”
Michaela smiled. “People are always telling me that.”
6
The catastrophic state of the Squeaky Wheel’s men’s room had likewise driven Frank Geary out to the edge of the parking lot to empty his bladder. In the aftermath of what they had seen—moths born out of fire—it seemed stupid to do anything except go to a bar and drink. With his own eyes he had witnessed something that could not be accounted for. There was another side to the world. There was a deeper stratum that had been wholly invisible until that morning. It hadn’t shown itself as proof of Elaine’s God, though. The moths had grown from the fire, and fire was what was supposed to be waiting at the other end of the spiritual spectrum.
Brush crunched a few yards off. “That bathroom is a fuckin hellhole . . .” The man’s slur trailed off. Frank discerned a narrow shape wearing a cowboy hat.
Frank zipped up and turned to head back to the bar. He didn’t know what else to do. He’d left Nana and Elaine at home, laid out on beach towels in the basement with the door locked.
The man’s voice stopped him.
“Want to hear something crazy? My buddy’s wife, Millie, she works up at the prison, and she says they got a—what, some kind of fee-nom up there. Probably bullshit, that’s my opinion, but . . .” The man’s urine spattered in the brush. “She says this honey, when she sleeps, nothin happens. Wakes up again.”
Frank stopped. “What?”
The man was twisting back and forth in a deliberate fashion, amusing himself by spilling his piss around as widely as possible. “Sleeps and wakes up like normal. Wakes up fine. So my buddy’s wife says.”
A cloud shifted in the sky and moonlight disclosed the distinct profile of that noted dog-beater, Fritz Meshaum. The pubic scrag of hillbilly beard and the deeply sunken area beneath the right cheekbone, where Frank had used the rifle butt to permanently alter the contours of the man’s face, were both clearly visible.
“Who’s that I’m speakin with?” Fritz was squinting ferociously. “That you, Kronsky? How’s that .45 working out for you, Johnny Lee? Fine gun, innit? No, that’s not Kronsky. Christ, I’m not seein double, I’m seein fuckin triple.”
“She wakes up?” asked Frank. “This inmate at the prison wakes up? No cocoon?”
“That’s what I heard, but take it as you will. Say, I know you, mister?”
Frank headed back to the bar without answering. He didn’t have time for Meshaum. It was this woman he was thinking of, this inmate who could sleep and wake up like normal.
7
When Frank rejoined Terry and Don Peters (followed by Garth Flickinger, who came strutting back from the women’s room like a new man), his drinking companions had turned around on the bench of their long table. A man in jeans, a blue chambray workshirt, and a Case gimme cap was on his feet and holding forth, gesturing with a half-full pitcher of beer, and those around him had grown silent, listening respectfully. He looked familiar, a local farmer or maybe a long-haul trucker, his cheeks speckled with beard and his teeth discolored from Red Man, but he had a preacher’s self-assured delivery, his voice rising and falling in cadences that begged for return cries of praise Jesus. Sitting next to him was a man Frank definitely recognized, having helped him select a dog from the shelter when his old one died. Howland, that was his name. Teacher from the community college over in Maylock. Howland was looking up at the sermonizer with an expression of wry amusement.
“We shoulda seen this coming!” the trucker/preacher proclaimed. “The women flew too high, like that fella with the wax wings, and their wings melted!”
“Icarus,” Howland said. He wore a baggy old barn jacket with patches on the elbows. His specs stuck up out of the breast pocket.
“Ike-a-rus, that is correct, that is a big ten-four! Want to know how far the fair sex has come? Look back a hundred years! They couldn’t vote! Skirts down to their ankles! They didn’t have no birth control, and if they got a ’bortion, they went down some back alley to get it and if they got caught, they went to jail for murrr-der! Now they can get it done any time and place they want! Thanks to Planned Fuckin Parenthood, ’bortion’s easier than gettin a bucket of chicken from KFC and costs about the same! They can run for president! They join the SEALS and the Rangers! They can marry their lesbo buddies! If that ain’t terroristic, I don’t know what is.”
There was a rumble of agreement. Frank didn’t join in. He didn’t believe his problems with Elaine had anything whatsoever to do with abortion or lesbians.
“All in just one hundred years!” The trucker/preacher lowered his voice. He could do that and still be heard because someone had pulled the plug on the jukebox, killing Travis Tritt in a dying gurgle. “They ain’t just pulled even, like they said they wanted, they done pulled ahead. Do you want to know what proves it?”
Now, Frank had to admit, the man was getting closer to something. Elaine could never cut him any slack. It was always her way, her call. To find himself warming to this bumpkin’s homily gave Frank a sick feeling—but he couldn’t deny it. Nor was he alone. The whole barroom congregation was listening closely, their mouths agape. Except for Howland, who was grinning like a guy watching a monkey do a dance on a street corner.
“They can dress like men, that’s what proves it! A hundred years ago, a woman wouldn’t have been caught dead in pants unless she was ridin a hoss, and now they wear em everywhere!”
“What you got against long legs in tight pants, asshole?” a woman called, and there was general laughter.
“Nuthin!” the trucker/preacher shot back. “But do you think a man—a natural man, not one of those New York trannies—would be caught dead on the streets of Dooling in a dress? No! They’d be called crazy! They’d be laughed at! But the women, now they get to have it both ways! They forgot what the Bible says about how a woman should follow her husband in all things, and sew, and cook, and have the kiddies, and not be out in public wearing hot pants! Get even with men, they mighta been left alone! But that wasn’t enough! They had to get ahead! Had to make us second best! They flew too close to the sun and God put em to sleep!”
He blinked and rubbed a hand over his beard-scratchy face, seeming to realize where he was and what he was doing—spewing his private thoughts to a barroom filled with staring people.
“Ike-a-rus,” he said, and abruptly sat down.
“Thank you, Mr. Carson Struthers, from RFD 2.” That was Pudge Marone, bartender and owner of the Squeak, hollering out from behind his bar. “Our own local celebrity, folks: ‘Country Strong’ Struthers. Watch out for the right hook. Carson’s my ex-brother-in-law.” Pudge was a would-be comedian with saggy Rodney Dangerfield cheeks. Not all that funny, but he gave a fair pour. “That was some real food for thought, Carson. I look forward to discussing all this with my sister at Thanksgiving dinner.”
There was more laughter at that.
Before the general conversation could start up again, or before someone could plug in the juke and reanimate Mr. Tritt, Howland stood up, holding a hand in the air. History professor, Frank suddenly remembered. That’s what he said he was. Said he was going to name his new dog Tacitus, after his favorite Roman historian. Frank had thought it was a lot of name for a bichon frise.
“My friends,” the professor said in rolling tones, “with all that has happened today, it is easy to understand why we haven’t yet thought of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows to come. Let us put morals and morality and hot pants aside for a moment and consider the practicalities.”
He patted Carson “Country Strong” Struthers’s burly shoulder.
“This gentleman has a point; women have indeed surpassed men in certain aspects, at least in western society, and I submit that they have done so in ways rather more important than their freedom to shop at Walmart ungirdled and with their hair in rollers. Suppose this—let’s call it a plague, for want of a better word—suppose this plague had gone the other way, and it was the men falling asleep and not waking up?”
Utter silence in the Squeaky Wheel. Every eye trained on Howland, who seemed to enjoy the attention. His delivery was not that of a backwoods Bible-thumper, but it was still mesmerizing: unhesitating and practiced.
“The women could re-start the human race, could they not? Of course they could. There are millions of sperm donations—frozen babies-in-waiting—stored in facilities all across this great country of ours. Tens and tens of millions across the world! The result would be babies of both sexes!”
“Assuming the new male babies didn’t also grow cocoons as soon as they stopped crying and fell asleep for the first time,” a very pretty young woman said. She had appeared alongside Flickinger. It occurred to Frank that the trucker/preacher/ex-boxer had missed one thing in his oration: women just naturally looked better than men. More finished, somehow.
“Yes,” Howland agreed, “but even if that were the case, women could continue to reproduce for generations, possibly until Aurora ran its course. Can men do that? Gentlemen, where will the human race be in fifty years, if the women don’t wake up? Where will it be in a hundred?”
Now the silence was broken by a man who began to bawl in great, noisy blabbers.
Howland ignored him. “But perhaps the question of future generations is moot.” He raised a finger. “History suggests an extremely uncomfortable idea about human nature, my friends, one that may explain why, as this gentleman here has so passionately elucidated, women have got ahead. The idea, baldly stated, is this: women are sane, but men are mad.”
“Bullshit!” someone called. “Fuckin bullshit!”
Howland was not deterred; he actually smiled. “Is it? Who makes up your motorcycle gangs? Men. Who comprises the gangs that have turned neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit into free-fire zones? Boys. Who are the ones in power who start the wars and who are the ones who—with the exception of a few female helicopter pilots and such—fight those wars? Men. Oh, and who suffers as collateral damage? Women and children, mostly.”
“Yeah, and who shakes their asses, egging em on?” Don Peters shouted. His face was red. Veins were standing out on the sides of his neck. “Who’s pulling the motherfucking strings, Mr. Egghead Smartboy?”
There was a spatter of applause. Michaela rolled her eyes and was about to speak. Full of meth, blood pressure redlining, she felt like she could go on for perhaps six hours, the length of a Puritan sermon. But before she could start, Howland was off again.
“Thoughtfully put, sir, the contribution of a true intellectual, and a belief that many men advance, usually ones with a certain sense of inferiority when it comes to the fairer s—”
Don started to rise. “Who are you calling inferior, jackwad?”
Frank pulled him down, wanting to keep this one close. If Fritz Meshaum had really gotten hold of something, he needed to talk to Don Peters about it. Because he was pretty sure Don worked at the prison.
“Let me go,” Don snarled.
Frank slid his hand up to Don’s armpit and squeezed. “You need to calm down.”
Don grimaced, but didn’t say anything more.
“Here is an interesting fact,” Howland continued. “During the second half of the nineteenth century, most deep-mining operations, including those right here in Appalachia, employed workers called coolies. No, not Chinese peons; these were young men, sometimes boys as young as twelve, whose job it was to stand next to machinery that had a tendency to overheat. The coolies had a barrel of water, or a pipe, if there was a spring nearby. Their task was to pour water over the belts and pistons, to keep them cool. Hence the name coolies. I would submit that women have historically served the same function, restraining men—at least when possible—from their very worst, most abhorrent acts.”
He looked around at his audience. The smile had left his face.
“But now it seems the coolies are gone, or going. How long before men—soon to be the only sex—fall on each other with their guns and bombs and nuclear weapons? How long before the machine overheats and explodes?”
Frank had heard enough. It wasn’t the future of the entire human race he cared about. If it could be saved, that would be a side-effect. What he cared about was Nana. He wanted to kiss her sweet face, and to apologize for stretching her favorite shirt. Tell her he would never do it again. He could not do those things unless she was awake.
“Come on,” he said to Don. “Outside. I want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
Frank leaned close to Peters’s ear. “Is there really a woman at the prison who can sleep without growing webs and then wake up?”
Don craned around to look at Frank. “Hey, you’re the town dogcatcher, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.” Frank let the dogcatcher bullshit slide. “And you’re Don who works at the prison.”
“Yeah,” said Don. “That’s me. So let’s talk.”
8
Clint and Lila had gone out to the back porch, the overhead light turning them into actors on a stage. They were looking toward the pool where Anton Dubcek had been skimming for dead bugs less than twenty-four hours earlier. Clint wondered idly where Anton was now. Sleeping, likely as not. Dreaming of willing young women rather than preparing for an unpleasant conversation with his wife. If so, Clint envied him.
“Tell me about Sheila Norcross, honey. The girl you saw at the basketball game.”
Lila favored him with an ugly smile of which he would have thought her incapable. It showed all of her teeth. Above it, her eyes—deep in their sockets now, with dark brown circles beneath them—glittered. “As if you don’t know. Honey.”
Put on your therapist’s hat, he told himself. Remember that she’s high on dope and running on fumes. Exhausted people can slip very easily into paranoia. But it was hard. He saw the outline of it; she thought that some girl he’d never heard of was his daughter by Shan Parks. But it was impossible, and when your wife accused you of something impossible, and everything else in the world was, by any rational standard, more important and immediate, it was very, very hard to keep from losing your temper.
“Tell me what you know. Then I’ll tell you what I know. But let’s begin with one simple fact. That girl is not my daughter, whether she has my name or not, and I have never broken our marriage vows.” She turned as if to go back inside. He caught her by the arm. “Please. Tell me before—”
Before you go to sleep and we lose whatever chance we have to square this, he thought.
“Before it can fester any more than it already has.”
Lila shrugged. “Does it even matter, with everything else?”
His very thought a moment ago, but he could have said it matters to you. He kept his mouth closed instead. Because in spite of all that was happening in the wider world, it mattered to him, too.
“You know I never even wanted this pool, don’t you?” Lila asked.
“What?” Clint was baffled. What did the pool have to do with anything?
“Mom? Dad?” Jared was standing inside the screen door, listening.
“Jared, go back inside. This is between your mother and m—”
“No, let him listen,” Lila said. “If you insist on going through this, we will. Don’t you think he should know about his half-sister?” She turned to Jared. “She’s a year younger than you, she has blond hair, she’s a talented basketball player, and she’s as pretty as a picture. As you would be, if you were a girl. Because, see, she looks like you, Jere.”
“Dad?” His brow was furrowed. “What’s she talking about?”
Clint gave up. It was too late to do anything else. “Why don’t you tell us, Lila? Start from the beginning.”
9
Lila went through it, starting with the Curriculum Committee, and what Dorothy Harper had said to her afterward, how she hadn’t really thought much of it, but did an Internet search the next day. The search had brought her to the article, which included a mention of Shannon Parks, whom Clint had spoken of once before, and a striking photograph of Sheila Norcross. “She could almost be your twin, Jared.”
Jared slowly turned to his father.
The three of them now sat at the kitchen table.
Clint shook his head, but couldn’t help wondering what his face was showing. Because he felt guilty. As if there had really been something to feel guilty about. It was an interesting phenomenon. That night in 2002 what he’d whispered in Shannon’s ear was, “You know, I’ll always be there if you need me.” When she’d responded, “What if I needed you tonight?” Clint had said that was the one thing he couldn’t do. If he had slept with her, there would have been something to feel guilty about, but he’d refused her, so it was all good. Wasn’t it?
Maybe, but why had he never told Lila about the encounter? He couldn’t remember and he wasn’t required to defend what happened fifteen years before. She might as well demand that he explain why he’d knocked Jason down in the Burtells’ backyard for nothing more than a chocolate milkshake.
“Is that it?” Clint asked. He couldn’t resist adding, “Tell me that’s not all, Lila.”
“No, that’s not all,” she said. “Are you going to tell me that you didn’t know Shannon Parks?”
“You know I did,” Clint said. “I’m sure I’ve mentioned her name.”
“In passing,” Lila said. “But it was a little more than a passing acquaintance, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was. We were both caught in the foster system. For awhile we kept each other afloat. Otherwise one or both of us would have drowned. It was Shannon who got me to stop fighting. She said if I didn’t, I was apt to kill someone.” He took Lila’s hands across the table. “But that was years ago.”
Lila pulled her hands away. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Fifteen years ago!” Clint cried. It was ridiculous.
“Sheila Norcross is fifteen.”
“A year younger than me . . .” Jared said. If she’d been older—eighteen or nineteen—her birth would have pre-dated his parents’ marriage. But younger . . .
“And her father’s name,” Lila said, breathing hard, “is Clinton Norcross. It says so right on her school enrollment.”
“How did you get her enrollment?” Clint asked. “I didn’t know those documents were available to the general public.”
For the first time his wife looked uncomfortable rather than angry . . . and thus somehow less like a stranger.
“You make it sound sleazy.” Lila’s cheeks had flushed. “Okay, maybe it was sleazy. But I had to know the father’s name. Your name, as it turns out. So then I went to see her play. That’s where I was last night, in the Coughlin High gym, at an AAU game, watching your daughter play hoops. And it’s not just your face and your name she has.”
10
The horn blasted and the Tri-Counties AAU team jogged over to the sideline. Lila broke away from searching the stands for a sign of Shannon.
She saw Sheila Norcross nod at one of her teammates, a taller girl. They did an elaborate handshake: bumped fists, locked thumbs, and clapped hands over their heads.
It was the Cool Shake.
That was it, that was when Lila’s heart broke. Her husband was a man in a beguiling mask. All her doubts and dissatisfactions suddenly made sense.
The Cool Shake. She had seen Clint and Jared do it a hundred times. A thousand times. Bump, lock, clap-clap. There was a precious slideshow in her head of Jared, growing taller with each click of the wheel, filling out, hair darkening, doing the Cool Shake with his father. Clint had taught it to all the boys on Jared’s Little League team.
He’d taught her, too.